Lexical Derivation and the Form Class of Word Associations
Certain words are claimed by linguists to be derived out of simple lexical items. Such words should therefore be likely to elicit free associates from the grammatical category of their stems. Simple words, on the other hand, should follow the usual rule of eliciting associates from their own grammatical category. Previous research suggests that this is the case, but provides no criterion for distinguishing between simple and derived words. The present study explicitly specifies which words are to be regarded as derived, and finds no effect of the grammatical category of the stem upon the category of the associate.
1 Summary For Case Western Reserve University’s debut participation in TREC, we chose to participate in the Enterprise Track expert search task. Our motivation for participation stems from our work developing expert search capability for our prototype vertical digital library, MEMS World Online 1 . Our work incorporates two unique aspects. First, our relevance ranking mechanism relies on term position within each document rather than the number of term occurrences. This mechanism takes into account both term document rank and term co-occurrence proximity. Second, the expert score of closely related colleagues has a small eect on the score of each related expert. This follows the intuition that experts on a particular topic within a single organization tend to closely collaborate with one another. We also make some use of WordNet synonyms. We submitted a total of three runs to this years expert search task.