Associations are commonly collected by presenting target stimuli to participants in an experiment, who then provide associate responses, i.e., words that are called to mind by the stimulus words. The quantification of the resulting target-association pairs is called association norms.
Example: associations to the German verb klagen
We have performed several web experiments to collect
associations. The resources are freely available for education,
research and other non-commercial purposes. Please contact me to
obtain the data.
Available associations and association norms:
- association norms for German
verbs (collected by Sabine Schulte im Walde, Alissa
Melinger, and Katrin Erk)
- association norms for Italian
verbs (collected by Annamaria Guida, Alessandro Lenci,
and Sabine Schulte im Walde)
- associations for French
verbs (collected by Daniela Marzo and Sabine Schulte im
- association norms for German noun
compounds (collected by Susanne Borgwaldt and Sabine
Schulte im Walde)
- associations to German nouns (collected by Alissa Melinger and Andrea Weber), cf. their Database of Noun Associations for German that can be accessed online
The Representation of Verb Meaning within Lexical Semantic Memory: Evidence from Word Associations
Master's Thesis. Universitá degli studi di Pisa, 2007.
Alissa Melinger, Sabine Schulte im Walde, Andrea Weber
Characterizing Response Types and Revealing Noun Ambiguity in German Association Norms [pdf/bib]
In: Proceedings of the EACL Workshop Making Sense of Sense: Bringing Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics together. Trento, Italy, April 2006.
Michael Roth, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Corpus Co-Occurrence, Dictionary and Wikipedia Entries as Resources for Semantic Relatedness Information [pdf/bib]
In: Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Marrakech, Morocco, May 2008.
Sabine Schulte im Walde
Human Associations and the Choice of Features for Semantic Verb Classification [doi/preprint pdf/bib]
Research on Language and Computation 6(1):79-111, 2008.
Sabine Schulte im Walde, Susanne Borgwaldt
Association Norms for German Noun Compounds and their Constituents [doi/preprint pdf/bib]
Behavior Research Methods 47(4):1199-1221, 2015.
Sabine Schulte im Walde, Susanne Borgwaldt, Ronny Jauch
Association Norms of German Noun Compounds [pdf/poster/bib]
In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Istanbul, Turkey, May 2012.
Sabine Schulte im Walde, Alissa Melinger
An In-Depth Look into the Co-Occurrence Distribution of Semantic Associates [doi/pdf/errata/bib]
Italian Journal of Linguistics 20(1):89-128, 2008. Special Issue on From Context to Meaning: Distributional Models of the Lexicon in Linguistics and Cognitive Science.
Sabine Schulte im Walde, Alissa Melinger, Michael Roth, Andrea Weber
An Empirical Characterisation of Response Types in German Association Norms [doi/preprint pdf/bib]
Research on Language and Computation 6(2):205-238, 2008.
Sabine Schulte im Walde, Stefan Müller
Using Web Corpora for the Automatic Acquisition of Lexical-Semantic Knowledge [doi/pdf/bib]
Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics 28(2):85-105, 2013. Special Issue on Web Corpora for Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Research, edited by Roman Schneider, Angelika Storrer and Alexander Mehler.