Sorry, what was your name again, or how to overcome the tip-of-the tongue problem with the help of a computer?

  • Authors:
  • Michael Zock

  • Affiliations:
  • LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay-Cedex, France

  • Venue:
  • SEMANET '02 Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on Building and using semantic networks - Volume 11
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

A speaker or writer has to find words for expressing his thoughts. Yet, knowing a word does not guarantee its access. Who hasn't experienced the problem of looking for a word he knows, yet is unable to access (in time)? Work done by psychologists reveals that people being in this so called tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT) know a lot about the word: meaning, number of syllables, origine, etc. Speakers are generally able to recognize the word, and if they produce an erroneous word, that token shares many things with the target word (initial/final letter/phoneme, part of speech, semantic field, etc.). This being so, one might want to take advantage of the situation and build a program that assists the speaker/writer by revealing the word that's on his/her mind (tongue/pen). Three methods will be presented, the first one being implemented.