A Solution to Plato’s Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction and Representation of Knowledge

How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to school-children. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched.