• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.303-321
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• 2006

According to Harris'(1966) distributional hypothesis, understanding the meaning of a word is thought to be dependent on its context. Under this hypothesis about human language ability, this paper proposes a computational model for native speaker's language processing mechanism concerning word sense disambiguation, based on two sets of experiments. Among the three computational models discussed in this paper, namely, the logic model, the probabilistic model, and the probabilistic inference model, the experiment shows that the logic model is first applied fer semantic disambiguation of the key word. Nexr, if the logic model fails to apply, then the probabilistic model becomes most relevant. The three models were also compared with the test results in terms of Pearson correlation coefficient value. It turns out that the logic model best explains the human decision behaviour on the ambiguous words, and the probabilistic inference model tomes next. The experiment consists of two pans; one involves 30 sentences extracted from 1 million graphic-word corpus, and the result shows the agreement rate anong native speakers is at 98% in terms of word sense disambiguation. The other pm of the experiment, which was designed to exclude the logic model effect, is composed of 50 cleft sentences.