It Means More if It Sounds Good: Yet Another Hypothesis Concerning the Evolution of Polysemous Words
Computation and Language
2021-01-08 v2 Metric Geometry
Abstract
This position paper looks into the formation of language and shows ties between structural properties of the words in the English language and their polysemy. Using Ollivier-Ricci curvature over a large graph of synonyms to estimate polysemy it shows empirically that the words that arguably are easier to pronounce also tend to have multiple meanings.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2003.05758,
title = {It Means More if It Sounds Good: Yet Another Hypothesis Concerning the Evolution of Polysemous Words},
author = {Ivan P. Yamshchikov and Cyrille Merleau Nono Saha and Igor Samenko and Jürgen Jost},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.05758},
year = {2021}
}