A Mathematical Approach to Investigate the Relationship between Association Memory and Latent Semantic Analysis in English and Chinese

Certain previous researches attempted to characterize how association memory works for items. LSA (latent semantic analysis) is usually showed highly related to forward association memory. A naive postulation would assume that the mechanisms for that relationship is mainly due to semantic similarity. The present work proposes that the linkage between LSA and association memory could be built on classical conditioning itself. The assumption is proven by analyzing the degree of divergence of association networks in the English and Chinese word database. Association memory of low frequency words is not found correlated to LSA in English, but correlated to scenario situations or proverbs. The results also showed that the reciprocal of divergence degree indicates the correlation of LSA and association memory. Finally, the mechanism of classical conditioning can be used to explain how the association memory is formed, and why the strength of constructing condition responses of classical conditioning from context is featured by LSA.

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