Related papers: Survey in Characterizing Semantic Change
Semantic communication, leveraging advanced deep learning techniques, emerges as a new paradigm that meets the requirements of next-generation wireless networks. However, current semantic communication systems, which employ neural coding…
Morphological and syntactic changes in word usage (as captured, e.g., by grammatical profiles) have been shown to be good predictors of a word's meaning change. In this work, we explore whether large pre-trained contextualised language…
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present…
This paper presents the first unsupervised approach to lexical semantic change that makes use of contextualised word representations. We propose a novel method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word…
Modern language models are capable of contextualizing words based on their surrounding context. However, this capability is often compromised due to semantic change that leads to words being used in new, unexpected contexts not encountered…
Though languages can evolve slowly, they can also react strongly to dramatic world events. By studying the connection between words and events, it is possible to identify which events change our vocabulary and in what way. In this work, we…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…
We demonstrate the utility of a new methodological tool, neural-network word embedding models, for large-scale text analysis, revealing how these models produce richer insights into cultural associations and categories than possible with…
This chapter examines current developments in linguistic theory and methods, focusing on the increasing integration of computational, cognitive, and evolutionary perspectives. We highlight four major themes shaping contemporary linguistics:…
We perform statistical analysis of the phenomenon of neology, the process by which new words emerge in a language, using large diachronic corpora of English. We investigate the importance of two factors, semantic sparsity and frequency…
One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood.…
Semantic measures are widely used today to estimate the strength of the semantic relationship between elements of various types: units of language (e.g., words, sentences, documents), concepts or even instances semantically characterized…
Diachronic word embeddings -- vector representations of words over time -- offer remarkable insights into the evolution of language and provide a tool for quantifying sociocultural change from text documents. Prior work has used such…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…
State-of-the-art approaches for metaphor detection compare their literal - or core - meaning and their contextual meaning using metaphor classifiers based on neural networks. However, metaphorical expressions evolve over time due to various…
Divergent word usages reflect differences among people. In this paper, we present a novel angle for studying word usage divergence -- word interpretations. We propose an approach that quantifies semantic differences in interpretations among…
Words can be represented by composing the representations of subword units such as word segments, characters, and/or character n-grams. While such representations are effective and may capture the morphological regularities of words, they…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…