DIFFERENTIAL NUMERICAL QUANTIFICATION OF SAME VAGUE QUANTIFIERS

Sneha Agarwal

Y9588

SE 367: Introduction to Cognitive Science

Mentor: Dr. Amitabha Mukerjee

Abstract

Often, the answers to many psychological and social studies surveys are in the terms of 'many a times' and 'not often'. Every time the responses cannot be in numbers. Conversion to numerical values can be important for computation purposes. Here, the study is on the non-numerical quantifiers in Hindi language, like, कुछ, कई and बहुत सारे. This paper tries to account for the factors that make the mapping of language quantifiers to non-language ones, non-linear. Experiments have been done to show how the other objects present in the picture about and also, how the spacing of objects in space affects our decisions about the main object being asked about. Finally, this paper comes up with an interesting study on how the answers changed from people with highly-developed analytical powers to the ones with normal analytical abilities.

About

In various behavioral studies, answers are not often in terms of numbers. Finally, we do need computers to interpret such results for us. But, various factors involved make it impossible to do so. Including proper variations due of such factors should highly improve the mapping of vague quantifiers to numerical scale.

The basic theme of this paper is based on the paper by Coventry et al, 2005^[2]. The aim of this project is to carry out experiments on the lines of Coventry, using Hindi language quantifiers rather than English and to verify their hypothesis. An additional variation of percentage of screen covered and the group of people being questioned has been added here.

Outline of results obtained

We got similar context effects for Hindi quantifiers as already established for English quantifiers. This establishes some basic universal structure in the understanding of languages.

Other objects present in the scene also influence our decisions about the main focus. Therefore, interpretation of language quantifiers cannot be absolute across all scenarios.

And this difference is not only due to modifications in the scene being questioned about but can also vary greatly from person to person.

These are only a few such factors, a lot others can be investigated, too.

REFERENCES

1. Coventry KR, Cangelosi A, Newstead S, Bacon A, Rajapakse R (2005) Grounding natural language quantifiers in visual attention. In: 27th annual meeting of the cognitive science society, Stresa, July 2005

2. Coventry KR, Lynott L, Cangelosi A, Knight L, Joyce D, Richardson DC. Spatial language, visual attention, and perceptual simulation. Brain and Language 2010