Related papers: Analyzing Polysemy Evolution Using Semantic Cells
Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most…
Most prior work on definition modeling has not accounted for polysemy, or has done so by considering definition modeling for a target word in a given context. In contrast, in this study, we propose a context-agnostic approach to definition…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
Word embeddings are representations of individual words of a text document in a vector space and they are often use- ful for performing natural language pro- cessing tasks. Current state of the art al- gorithms for learning word embeddings…
Pre-trained language models (LMs) encode rich information about linguistic structure but their knowledge about lexical polysemy remains unclear. We propose a novel experimental setup for analysing this knowledge in LMs specifically trained…
Languages disfavor word forms containing sequences of similar or identical consonants, due to the biomechanical and cognitive difficulties posed by patterns of this sort. However, the specific evolutionary processes responsible for this…
We propose a model of the evolution of a matrix along a phylogenetic tree, in which transformations affect either entire rows or columns of the matrix. This represents the change of both lexical and phonological aspects of linguistic data,…
We introduce a method to measure uncertainty in large language models. For tasks like question answering, it is essential to know when we can trust the natural language outputs of foundation models. We show that measuring uncertainty in…
This paper connects a series of papers dealing with taxonomic word embeddings. It begins by noting that there are different types of semantic relatedness and that different lexical representations encode different forms of relatedness. A…
Conversations emerge as the primary media for exchanging ideas and conceptions. From the listener's perspective, identifying various affective qualities, such as sarcasm, humour, and emotions, is paramount for comprehending the true…
We use paraphrases as a unique source of data to analyze contextualized embeddings, with a particular focus on BERT. Because paraphrases naturally encode consistent word and phrase semantics, they provide a unique lens for investigating…
Most language modeling methods rely on large-scale data to statistically learn the sequential patterns of words. In this paper, we argue that words are atomic language units but not necessarily atomic semantic units. Inspired by HowNet, we…
Sentence fusion is the task of joining related sentences into coherent text. Current training and evaluation schemes for this task are based on single reference ground-truths and do not account for valid fusion variants. We show that this…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
Biosemiosis is a process of choice-making between simultaneously alternative options. It is well-known that, when sufficiently young children encounter a new word, they tend to interpret it as pointing to a meaning that does not have a word…
In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method to identify noun sense changes based on rigorous analysis of time-varying text data available in the form of millions of digitized books. We construct distributional thesauri based networks…
Resolution of lexical ambiguity, commonly termed ``word sense disambiguation'', is expected to improve the analytical accuracy for tasks which are sensitive to lexical semantics. Such tasks include machine translation, information…
The words-as-classifiers model of grounded lexical semantics learns a semantic fitness score between physical entities and the words that are used to denote those entities. In this paper, we explore how such a model can incrementally…
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…
Despite the predominance of contextualized embeddings in NLP, approaches to detect semantic change relying on these embeddings and clustering methods underperform simpler counterparts based on static word embeddings. This stems from the…