Survey on the Usefulness of Word Concepts in Estimating the Understanding of Words for Specific Individuals

Abstract

In this study we estimated the understanding of words in order to visualize a person’s individual vocabulary. We have hypothesized that words which people understand or, conversely, do not, tend to be concentrated on certain word concepts (concepts indicated by the word). Therefore, we proposed a method for estimating the understanding of words combining word concept created by word2vec and Hierarchical Neural Network, and succeeded in estimating the understanding of words with an accuracy of over 72%. From the results, it was suggested that the validity of the hypothesis and the word concept were useful for estimating the understanding of words. With implementation of additional indicators such as difficulty, estimation at a practical level can be anticipated.