Covert Categories and Folk Taxonomies

Are folk taxonomies “memes”?

This commentary stresses the importance of Atran’s work for the development of a new cognitive anthropology, but questions both his particular use of Dawkins’s “meme” model and the general usefulness of the meme model for understanding folk-taxonomies as cultural phenom-

Ethnopedology and Folk Soil Taxonomies

Automatic Construction of Taxonomies of Categories

Hierarchies are an intuitive and effective organization paradigm for data. Of late there has been considerable research on automatically learning a hierarchical organizations of data. In this paper, we formulate the problem of “automatically constructing hierarchical taxonomies”, which we define as learning a hierarchy of categories with no user defined parameters. We propose a framework that c...

Merging Specialist Taxonomies and Folk Taxonomies in Wordnets - A case Study of Plants, Animals and Foods in the Danish Wordnet

In this paper we investigate the problem of merging specialist taxonomies with the more intuitive folk taxonomies in lexical-semantic resources like wordnets; and we focus in particular on plants, animals and foods. We show that a traditional dictionary like Den Danske Ordbog (DDO) survives well with several inconsistencies between different taxonomies of the vocabulary and that a restructuring...

The Cultural Perceptions, Folk Taxonomies and the Relationship with Alternative Medicine Practices Among Hong Kong People