title: Corpus-based estimates of word association predict biases in judgment of word co-occurrence likelihood.
abstract: This paper draws a connection between statistical word association measures used in linguistics and confirmation measures from epistemology. Having theoretically established the connection, we replicate, in the new context of the judgments of word co-occurrence, an intriguing finding from the psychology of reasoning, namely that confirmation values affect intuitions about likelihood. We show that the effect, despite being based in this case on very subtle statistical insights about thousands of words, is stable across three different experimental settings. Our theoretical and empirical results suggest that factors affecting traditional reasoning tasks are also at play when linguistic knowledge is probed, and they provide further evidence for the importance of confirmation in a new domain.
authors.affiliation: Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy.
authors.forename: Denis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Paperno
authors.affiliation: Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy.
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Marelli
authors.affiliation: Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy.
authors.forename: Katya
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tentori
authors.affiliation: Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy.
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Baroni
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D015982:Bias; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods*; D011336:Probability; D013223:Statistics as Topic
keywords: Confirmation; Linguistic corpora; Probability judgment; Word association