Word Association Testing and Thesaurus Construction: A Pilot Study

This pilot study examines the use of word association testing in the derivation of user-derived descriptors, descriptor hierarchies, and categories of inter-term relationships for the purpose of thesaurus construction. Ten participants, who were students, were presented with a test-bed of 15 domain-specific stimulus terms and were asked to provide as many response words as they could for each stimulus term and to describe how the response and stimulus terms are inter-related. Theword association testwas successful in generating a significant number ofword pairs and facet indicators that could be used to display inter-term relationships in thesauri. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]