Related papers: Methods, Data, and Conceptual Change: Reflections …
In this paper, a method for measuring synchronic corpus (dis-)similarity put forward by Kilgarriff (2001) is adapted and extended to identify trends and correlated changes in diachronic text data, using the Corpus of Historical American…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
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…
The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements…
We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…
Our languages are in constant flux driven by external factors such as cultural, societal and technological changes, as well as by only partially understood internal motivations. Words acquire new meanings and lose old senses, new words are…
The amount of scholarly data has been increasing dramatically over the last years. For newcomers to a particular science domain (e.g., IR, physics, NLP) it is often difficult to spot larger trends and to position the latest research in the…
We present a qualitative analysis of the (potentially erroneous) outputs of contextualized embedding-based methods for detecting diachronic semantic change. First, we introduce an ensemble method outperforming previously described…
We present a novel combination of dynamic embedded topic models and change-point detection to explore diachronic change of lexical semantic modality in classical and early Christian Latin. We demonstrate several methods for finding and…
This study demonstrates how hybrid neural-symbolic methods can yield significant new insights into the evolution of a morphologically rich, low-resource language. We challenge the naive assumption that linguistic change is simplification by…
Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain…
Data-driven approaches have revolutionized scientific research, with machine learning and statistical analysis being commonly used methodologies. Despite their widespread use, these approaches differ significantly in their techniques,…
Question answering (QA) in English has been widely explored, but multilingual datasets are relatively new, with several methods attempting to bridge the gap between high- and low-resourced languages using data augmentation through…
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…
This paper compares a qualitative reasoning model of translation with a quantitative statistical model. We consider these models within the context of two hypothetical speech translation systems, starting with a logic-based design and…
The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific…
In this paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of related…
Here we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the population scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both…
People spend a substantial portion of their lives engaged in conversation, and yet our scientific understanding of conversation is still in its infancy. In this report we advance an interdisciplinary science of conversation, with findings…
The development of new statistical and computational methods is increasingly making it possible to bridge the gap between hard sciences and humanities. In this study, we propose an approach based on a quantitative evaluation of attributes…