---
title: "Meaning and the Mental Lexicon"
authors:
  - "Will Lowe"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/158"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/0158.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1997
pages: "1092-1096"
track: "Neural Networks"
keywords:
---

# Meaning and the Mental Lexicon

Will Lowe

*Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1092-1096.

## Abstract

This paper presents a network model of the mental lexicon and its formation. Models of word meaning typically postulate a network of nodes with connection strengths, or distances, that reflect semantic similarity, but se ldom explain how the network is formed or how it could be represented in the brain. The model presented here is an attempt to address these questions. The network organizes semantically similar words into clusters when exposed to sequentially presented text. Lexica l co-occurrence information is calcu lat ed and used to cr eate a hierarchical semantic representation. The output is similar to semantic networks first described by [Collins and Loftus, 1975], but is created automatica lly.