SEMANTIC PROXIMITY OF ASTRONOMICAL CONCEPTS DENOTING CELESTIAL BODIES

The problem of determining the semantic similarity of astronomical terms denoting celestial objects in a school astronomy course is considered. A distributive method is used, which consists in comparing the distributions of concepts in the astronomy textbook. With the help of special computer programs, punctuation marks and stop words are removed from the text, the number of mentions of various terms is deter-mined, the cosine measure of proximity and the semantic distance between concepts are calculated. This allows: 1) to reveal frequently used astronomical concepts denoting celestial bodies; 2) to obtain matrices of proximity and semantic distances between the concepts of "galaxy", "star", "Sun", "planet", "black hole", "white dwarf", etc.; 3) to create a mental map of the celestial bodies that make up the Solar system, taking into account the distances between the terms designating them 4) to build clouds of concepts "types of stars", "Earth – star – Universe". To model the semantic space of the textbook, the Graf.pas computer program is used, which randomly moves vertices in 2D or 3D space, each time calculating the potential energy W of the elastic rods connecting them and choosing such an arrangement of vertices that W is minimal. It is believed that the closely located vertices are connected by rigid rods, and the far removed ones are connected by elastic rubber threads.