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Word Space Creator: A Visual Tool for Semantic Space Visualization
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Description: Semantic spaces are used as a representation of language, capturing the meaning between linguistic units. These spaces are often built in large corpora requiring advanced equipment, specialized computational skills, and considerable effort. This project note will introduce and demonstrate the use of an accessible Shiny graphical interface allowing users to create semantic space models easily. Shiny is an R package in which one can program interactive web applications in R for others to interact with data or analyses. The advantage to Shiny applications is that naïve users can explore data without understanding the programming, and open sharing of code with the application can aid in learning the programming for one’s own use in their research. Within the application, users will be able to load popular semantic spaces or their own corpus for semantic space creation utilizing their preferred modeling technique, including LSA and TOPICS. A variety of user-friendly graphical tools, such as n-nearest neighbors or topic weighted graph, will further aid data visualization of the semantic network. Additionally, the application provides the calculation of cosine or simple co-occurrence, among other popular-relatedness values. This tool is intended for researchers who may not be programming-savvy, or as a teaching extension for psycholinguistics courses.