Recognition times for 54 thousand Dutch words : data from the Dutch crowdsourcing project

We present a new database of Dutch word recognition times for a total of 54 thousand words, called the Dutch Crowdsourcing Project. The data were collected with an Internet vocabulary test. The database is limited to native Dutch speakers. Participants were asked to indicate which words they knew. Their response times were registered, even though the participants were not asked to respond as fast as possible. Still, the response times correlate around .7 with the response times of the Dutch Lexicon Projects for shared words. Also results of virtual experiments indicate that the new response times are a valid addition to the Dutch Lexicon Projects. This not only means that we have useful response times for some 20 thousand extra words, but we now also have data on differences in response latencies as a function of education and age. The new data correspond better to word use in the Netherlands

A plea for more interactions between psycholinguistics and natural language processing research

A new development in psycholinguistics is the use of regression analyses on tens of thousands of words, known as the megastudy approach. This development has led to the collection of processing times and subjective ratings (of age of acquisition, concreteness, valence, and arousal) for most of the existing words in English and Dutch. In addition, a crowdsourcing study in the Dutch language has resulted in information about how well 52,000 lemmas are known. This information is likely to be of interest to NLP researchers and computational linguists. At the same time, large-scale measures of word characteristics developed in the latter traditions are likely to be pivotal in bringing the megastudy approach to the next level

Public opinion indicates the EU is not seen as a better development partner than China in most African countries

Both China and the EU have attempted to form strong relationships with African countries over recent years, but how do citizens within these countries view China and the EU as development partners? Floor Keuleers presents survey evidence from a number of different countries in Africa. She notes that while views of the EU are positive in most cases, there is no evidence that the EU is seen as a better development partner than China overall