Word association testing and thesaurus construction

• Main Author: Spiteri, Louise F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Library and information science
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/152562
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper examines the suitability of word association tests to generate user-derived descriptors, descriptor hierarchies, and categories of inter-term relationships. The typical assumption underlying these word association tests is that the response terms function either as synonyms or antonyms, an assumption that restricts unnecessarily the potential value of such tests. Rather than assuming how people inter-relate two terms, it may be more useful to ask participants to explain why they think these two terms are related. In this study, thirty library and information science practitioners were asked to provide as many response words as they could for fifteen stimulus terms and to describe how the response and stimulus terms were inter-related. The word association test was successful in generating a set of user-derived descriptors . Participants identified twenty types of inter-term relationships, the most commonly-cited of which are type, part, synonym, activity, and tool. That the participants identified a total of twenty types of relationships suggests also that word association tests can serve as a valuable tool in examining the different ways users group terms and the types of inter-term relationships that end users most commonly associate with any given concept and its response terms.