Contextual vocabulary acquisition as computational philosophy and as philosophical computation

Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for an unknown word in a text by reasoning from textual clues, prior knowledge, and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. Published strategies for doing CVA vaguely and unhelpfully tell the reader to “guess”. AI algorithms for CVA can fill in the details that replace “guessing” by “computing”; these details can then be converted to a curriculum that can be taught to students to improve their reading comprehension. Such algorithms also suggest a way out of the Chinese Room and show how holistic semantics can withstand certain objections. 1 

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JETAI
• Authors: William J. Rapaport, Michael W. Kibby
• Keywords: Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition, Deliberate Acquisition, JETAI 2007, Unknown Word