A solution to Plato's problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge.
1997/04/01 by Thomas K. Landauer, Susan Dumais · 37 citations
Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Categorization, perception, and language #Language and cultural evolution
paper · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.104.2.211
openalex publication_date 1997/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Abstract
How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched.
Citations
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- Distributional semantics [wikipedia]
- Language acquisition [wikipedia]
- Similarity (psychology) [wikipedia]
- Statistical semantics [wikipedia]