Related papers: Reliable Detection and Quantification of Selective…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
This research offers a new interdisciplinary approach to the field of Linguistics by using Computational Linguistics, NLP, Bayesian Statistics and Sociolinguistics methods. This thesis investigates word order change in infinitival clauses…
Terms in diachronic text corpora may exhibit a high degree of semantic dynamics that is only partially captured by the common notion of semantic change. The new measure of context volatility that we propose models the degree by which terms…
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…
One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations of language contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present in a speech community in relation to the number of…
The way the words are used evolves through time, mirroring cultural or technological evolution of society. Semantic change detection is the task of detecting and analysing word evolution in textual data, even in short periods of time. In…
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than others. Usually, the rate of replacement for a given item is…
In this paper I propose a new way of measuring linguistic productivity that objectively assesses the ability of an affix to be used to coin new complex words and, unlike other popular measures, is not directly dependent upon token…
The use of abusive language online has become an increasingly pervasive problem that damages both individuals and society, with effects ranging from psychological harm right through to escalation to real-life violence and even death.…
This study investigates the consequences of training language models on synthetic data generated by their predecessors, an increasingly prevalent practice given the prominence of powerful generative models. Diverging from the usual emphasis…
Facts are subject to contingencies and can be true or false in different circumstances. One such contingency is time, wherein some facts mutate over a given period, e.g., the president of a country or the winner of a championship.…
Semantic change detection concerns the task of identifying words whose meaning has changed over time. The current state-of-the-art detects the level of semantic change in a word by comparing its vector representation in two distinct time…
This work examines the impact of cross-linguistic transfer on grammatical errors in English as Second Language (ESL) texts. Using a computational framework that formalizes the theory of Contrastive Analysis (CA), we demonstrate that…
I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
Quantifying differences in terminologies from various academic domains has been a longstanding problem yet to be solved. We propose a computational approach for analyzing linguistic variation among scientific research fields by capturing…
Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…
Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space. Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in…
While there is a large amount of research in the field of Lexical Semantic Change Detection, only few approaches go beyond a standard benchmark evaluation of existing models. In this paper, we propose a shift of focus from change detection…