Record Detail

Word intuition is speakers’ intuitive knowledge on wordhood. Collective word intuition is
the word intuition of the whole language community. Given this definition, the optimal
word segmentation result in Chinese NLP should reflect collective word intuition. It is also
believed that an ideal definition of Chinese word should accord with the collective word
intuition of Chinese speakers. To test the validity and feasibility of modeling collective
word intuition, it is important to know to what extent Chinese speakers agree with each
other on what is a word. In this study, we measured word intuition agreement using
Mechanical Turk-based Chinese word segmentation experiment. Three metrics were
used: proportionate agreement, Cohen’s kappa, and Fleiss’ kappa. The results show that
Chinese speakers agree with each other almost perfectly on what is a word. And we
found no evidence to support an effect of semantic transparency on word intuition
agreement. Such high word intuition agreement among Chinese speakers supports the
psychological reality of Chinese word and also suggests that that it is quite feasible to
formulate a definition of Chinese word by modeling the collective word intuition of
Chinese speakers.