Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a computer-based model of acquisition of word meaning from context. The model uses semantic role assignments to search through a hierarchy of conceptual information for an appropriate meaning for an unknown word. The implementation of this approach has led to many surprising similarities with work in modeling human language acquisition. W e describe the learning task and the model, then present an empirical test and discuss the relationships between this approach and the work in psycholinguistics.