Related papers: Tracing Semantic Variation in Slang
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
This paper proposes a mixed-method socio-semantic network analysis of meaning structures in practice. While social and institutional fields impose meaning structures, to achieve practical goals field participants gather in groups and…
Recent research in psycholinguistics has provided increasing evidence that humans predict upcoming content. Prediction also affects perception and might be a key to robustness in human language processing. In this paper, we investigate the…
Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with…
The semantics used for particular terms in an academic field organically evolve over time. Tracking this evolution through inspection of published literature has either been from the perspective of Linguistic scholars or has concentrated…
Humans continuously adapt their style and language to a variety of domains. However, a reliable definition of `domain' has eluded researchers thus far. Additionally, the notion of discrete domains stands in contrast to the multiplicity of…
Semantic feature models have become a popular tool for prediction and interpretation of fMRI data. In particular, prior work has shown that differences in the fMRI patterns in sentence reading can be explained by context-dependent changes…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…
Semantics of a sentence is defined with much less ambiguity than semantics of a single word, and we assume that it should be better preserved by translation to another language. If multilingual sentence embeddings intend to represent…
The computational study of lexical semantic change (LSC) has taken off in the past few years and we are seeing increasing interest in the field, from both computational sciences and linguistics. Most of the research so far has focused on…
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female…
Languages are dynamic entities, where the meanings associated with words constantly change with time. Detecting the semantic variation of words is an important task for various NLP applications that must make time-sensitive predictions.…
Tags assigned by users to shared content can be ambiguous. As a possible solution, we propose semantic tagging as a collaborative process in which a user selects and associates Web resources drawn from a knowledge context. We applied this…
Natural language processing has made significant inroads into learning the semantics of words through distributional approaches, however representations learnt via these methods fail to capture certain kinds of information implicit in the…
The development of mechanised language specification based on structured operational semantics, with applications to verified compilers and sound program analysis, requires huge effort. General theory and frameworks have been proposed to…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
This paper measures variation in embedding spaces which have been trained on different regional varieties of English while controlling for instability in the embeddings. While previous work has shown that it is possible to distinguish…
Is it possible to develop a `physics of language' which can explain the spatial, temporal and social patterns we see, and which can predict future change like we forecast the weather? Such a theory is likely to involve ideas from…
Human communication often involves the use of verbal irony or sarcasm, where the speakers usually mean the opposite of what they say. To better understand how verbal irony is expressed by the speaker and interpreted by the hearer we conduct…