Related papers: Analyzing Polysemy Evolution Using Semantic Cells
Previous models for learning the semantic vectors of items and their groups, such as words, sentences, nodes, and graphs, using distributed representation have been based on the assumption that the basic sense of an item corresponds to one…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of…
Most words have several senses and connotations which evolve in time due to semantic shift, so that closely related words may gain different or even opposite meanings over the years. This evolution is very relevant to the study of language…
Word embeddings are ubiquitous in NLP and information retrieval, but it is unclear what they represent when the word is polysemous. Here it is shown that multiple word senses reside in linear superposition within the word embedding and…
We consider two graph models of semantic change. The first is a time-series model that relates embedding vectors from one time period to embedding vectors of previous time periods. In the second, we construct one graph for each word: nodes…
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…
Word evolution refers to the changing meanings and associations of words throughout time, as a byproduct of human language evolution. By studying word evolution, we can infer social trends and language constructs over different periods 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…
In this paper, we propose a statistical test to determine whether a given word is used as a polysemic word or not. The statistic of the word in this test roughly corresponds to the fluctuation in the senses of the neighboring words a nd the…
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…
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…
Lexical Semantic Change is the study of how the meaning of words evolves through time. Another related question is whether and how lexical relations over pairs of words, such as synonymy, change over time. There are currently two competing,…
The meaning of polysemous words often varies in a highly productive yet predictable way. Generalizing the regularity between conventional senses to derive novel word meaning is crucial for automated processing of non-literal language uses…
Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression…
The study of homonymy is vital to resolving fundamental problems in lexical semantics. In this paper, we propose four hypotheses that characterize the unique behavior of homonyms in the context of translations, discourses, collocations, and…
Much like sentences are composed of words, words themselves are composed of smaller units. For example, the English word questionably can be analyzed as question+able+ly. However, this structural decomposition of the word does not directly…
How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…
We propose a model for the evolutionary ecology of words as one attempt to extend evolutionary game theory and agent-based models by utilizing the rich linguistic expressions of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our model enables the emergence…
The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic…