Related papers: Methods, Data, and Conceptual Change: Reflections …
Metaphor is a fundamental cognitive mechanism that shapes scientific understanding, enabling the communication of complex concepts while potentially constraining paradigmatic thinking. Despite the prevalence of figurative language in…
Natural language processing (NLP) problems are ubiquitous in classical computing, where they often require significant computational resources to infer sentence meanings. With the appearance of quantum computing hardware and simulators, it…
Historical linguists have identified multiple forms of lexical semantic change. We present a three-dimensional framework for integrating these forms and a unified computational methodology for evaluating them concurrently. The dimensions…
Metonymy and metaphor often co-occur in natural language, yet computational work has studied them largely in isolation. We introduce a framework that transforms a literal sentence into three figurative variants: metonymic, metaphoric, and…
The IMPACT-es diachronic corpus of historical Spanish compiles over one hundred books --containing approximately 8 million words-- in addition to a complementary lexicon which links more than 10 thousand lemmas with attestations of the…
This paper addresses methodological issues in diachronic data analysis for historical research. We apply two families of topic models (LDA and DTM) on a relatively large set of historical newspapers, with the aim of capturing and…
Compositionality in language models presents a problem when processing idiomatic expressions, as their meaning often cannot be directly derived from their individual parts. Although fine-tuning and other optimization strategies can be used…
The organization and evolution of science has recently become itself an object of scientific quantitative investigation, thanks to the wealth of information that can be extracted from scientific documents, such as citations between papers…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of…
Language encodes societal beliefs about social groups through word patterns. While computational methods like word embeddings enable quantitative analysis of these patterns, studies have primarily examined gradual shifts in Western…
There are different ways of measuring diversity in complex systems. In particular, in language, lexical diversity is characterized in terms of the type-token ratio and the word entropy. We here investigate both diversity metrics in six…
It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the "true" popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural…
The goal of this paper is threefold: i) to present some practical aspects of using full-text version of Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the largest diachronic multi-genre corpus of the English language, in the investigation of…
We collect nine corpora of representative Chinese poetry for the time span of 1046 BCE and 1644 CE for studying the history of Chinese words, collocations, and patterns. By flexibly integrating our own tools, we are able to provide new…
In this work, we present to the NLP community, and to the wider research community as a whole, an application for the diachronic analysis of research corpora. We open source an easy-to-use tool coined: DRIFT, which allows researchers to…
A large body of work in psycholinguistics has focused on the idea that online language comprehension can be shallow or `good enough': given constraints on time or available computation, comprehenders may form interpretations of their input…
This paper presents a quantitative approach to studying linguistic and cultural change in China during the first half of the twentieth century, a period that remains understudied in computational humanities research. The dramatic changes in…
In this work, we systematically investigate how well current models of coherence can capture aspects of text implicated in discourse organisation. We devise two datasets of various linguistic alterations that undermine coherence and test…
This article presents a hybrid methodology for building a multilingual corpus designed to support the study of emerging concepts in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), illustrated here through the case of ``non-technological…