Horse or pony? Visual Typicality and Lexical Frequency Affect Variability in Object Naming
- Eleonora Gualdoni (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
- Thomas Brochhagen (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
- Andreas Mädebach (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
- Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, ICREA)
Abstract
Often we can use different names to refer to the same object (e.g., pony vs. horse) and naming choices vary among people. In the present study we explore factors that affect naming variation for visually presented objects. We analyse a large dataset of object naming with realistic images and focus on two factors: (a) the visual typicality of objects and their context for the names used by human annotators and (b) the lexical frequency of these names. We use a novel computational approach to estimate visual typicality by calculating the visual similarity of a given object (or context) and the average visual information of other objects which were given the same name (in an independent dataset). In difference to previous studies, we not only consider the name used by most annotators for a given object (top name) but explore also the role of the second most frequently used name (alternative name). Our results show that naming variation decreases the more typical an object is for its top name and the higher the lexical frequency of this name. For alternative names the opposite is found. Context typicality does not show a general effect in our analysis. Overall our results show that visual and lexical characteristics relating to name candidates beyond the top name are informative for predicting variability in object naming. On a methodological level, our results demonstrate the potential of using large scale datasets with realistic images in conjunction with computational methods to inform models of human object naming.
Keywords: object naming, object typicality, context typicality, visual typicality, name agreement, name variability, lexical frequency
How to Cite:
Gualdoni, E., Brochhagen, T., Mädebach, A. & Boleda, G., (2022) “Horse or pony? Visual Typicality and Lexical Frequency Affect Variability in Object Naming”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 5(1), 241-243. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/zsh0-nk37
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