Related papers: Characterizing Idioms: Conventionality and Conting…
Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
Language, which allows complex ideas to be communicated through symbolic sequences, is a characteristic feature of our species and manifested in a multitude of forms. Using large written corpora for many different languages and scripts, we…
In this paper, we propose methods for discovering semantic differences in words appearing in two corpora based on the norms of contextualized word vectors. The key idea is that the coverage of meanings is reflected in the norm of its mean…
Prosody -- the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo -- carries critical aspects of meaning. However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly…
How does word frequency in pre-training data affect the behavior of similarity metrics in contextualized BERT embeddings? Are there systematic ways in which some word relationships are exaggerated or understated? In this work, we explore…
A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…
Much previous work characterizing language variation across Internet social groups has focused on the types of words used by these groups. We extend this type of study by employing BERT to characterize variation in the senses of words as…
Sentence similarity is considered the basis of many natural language tasks such as information retrieval, question answering and text summarization. The semantic meaning between compared text fragments is based on the words semantic…
Are pairs of words that tend to occur together also likely to stand in a linguistic dependency? This empirical question is motivated by a long history of literature in cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and NLP. In this work we…
An individual's variation in writing style is often a function of both social and personal attributes. While structured social variation has been extensively studied, e.g., gender based variation, far less is known about how to characterize…
When reading a text, it is common to become stuck on unfamiliar words and phrases, such as polysemous words with novel senses, rarely used idioms, internet slang, or emerging entities. If we humans cannot figure out the meaning of those…
Lexical inference in context (LIiC) is the task of recognizing textual entailment between two very similar sentences, i.e., sentences that only differ in one expression. It can therefore be seen as a variant of the natural language…
Semantically non-compositional phrases constitute an intriguing research topic in Natural Language Processing. Semantic non-compositionality --the situation when the meaning of a phrase cannot be derived from the meaning of its components,…
We introduce a framework for quantifying semantic variation of common words in Communities of Practice and in sets of topic-related communities. We show that while some meaning shifts are shared across related communities, others are…
Idiomatic and figurative language form a large portion of colloquial speech and writing. With social media, this informal language has become more easily observable to people and trainers of large language models (LLMs) alike. While the…
Idioms are defined as a group of words with a figurative meaning not deducible from their individual components. Although modern machine translation systems have made remarkable progress, translating idioms remains a major challenge,…
Normality, in the colloquial sense, has historically been considered an aspirational trait, synonymous with ideality. The arithmetic average and, by extension, statistics including linear regression coefficients, have often been used to…
Abstract Contextuality is a property of systems of random variables. The identity of a random variable in a system is determined by its joint distribution with all other random variables in the same context. When context changes, a variable…
Meaning is context-dependent, but many properties of language (should) remain the same even if we transform the context. For example, sentiment, entailment, or speaker properties should be the same in a translation and original of a text.…