Related papers: Analyzing Polysemy Evolution Using Semantic Cells
Humans often make creative use of words to express novel senses. A long-standing effort in natural language processing has been focusing on word sense disambiguation (WSD), but little has been explored about how the sense inventory of a…
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.…
Spoken communication occurs in a "noisy channel" characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input,…
Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning…
Based on the Aristotelian concept of potentiality vs. actuality allowing for the study of energy and dynamics in language, we propose a field approach to lexical analysis. Falling back on the distributional hypothesis to statistically model…
While the task of assessing the plausibility of events such as ''news is relevant'' has been addressed by a growing body of work, less attention has been paid to capturing changes in plausibility as triggered by event modification.…
This thesis investigates the generation of new concepts from combinations of existing concepts as a language evolves. We give a method for combining concepts, and will be investigating the utility of composite concepts in language evolution…
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…
The semantics of emoji has, to date, been considered from a static perspective. We offer the first longitudinal study of how emoji semantics changes over time, applying techniques from computational linguistics to six years of Twitter data.…
The evolution of symbolic communication is a longstanding open research question in biology. While some theories suggest that it originated from sub-symbolic communication (i.e., iconic or indexical), little experimental evidence exists on…
Semantics, morphology and syntax are strongly interdependent. However, the majority of computational methods for semantic change detection use distributional word representations which encode mostly semantics. We investigate an alternative…
Understanding context-dependent variation in word meanings is a key aspect of human language comprehension supported by the lexicon. Lexicographic resources (e.g., WordNet) capture only some of this context-dependent variation; for example,…
Distributional semantics provides multi-dimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown in a large body of work in computational linguistics;…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of human languages, often used to express complex ideas in compressed or conventional ways (e.g. eager beaver as a keen and enthusiastic person). However, their interpretations may not be…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
Word embeddings are widely used in Natural Language Processing, mainly due to their success in capturing semantic information from massive corpora. However, their creation process does not allow the different meanings of a word to be…
Statistical models of word-sense disambiguation are often based on a small number of contextual features or on a model that is assumed to characterize the interactions among a set of features. Model selection is presented as an alternative…
Modelling semantic similarity plays a fundamental role in lexical semantic applications. A natural way of calculating semantic similarity is to access handcrafted semantic networks, but similarity prediction can also be anticipated in a…
Polysemy is a very common phenomenon in modern languages. Under many circumstances, there exists a primal meaning for the expression. We define the primal meaning of an expression to be a frequently used sense of that expression from which…
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…