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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…
Recent years have witnessed a surge of publications aimed at tracing temporal changes in lexical semantics using distributional methods, particularly prediction-based word embedding models. However, this vein of research lacks the cohesion,…
Dynamics of average length of words in Russian and English is analysed in the article. Words belonging to the diachronic text corpus Google Books Ngram and dated back to the last two centuries are studied. It was found out that average word…
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…
The distribution of information is essential for living system's ability to coordinate and adapt. Random walkers are often used to model this distribution process and, in doing so, one effectively assumes that information maintains its…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
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…
The versatility of renewal theory is owed to its abstract formulation. Renewals can be interpreted as steps of a random walk, switching events in two-state models, domain crossings of a random motion, etc. We here discuss a renewal process…
We present a manually annotated lexical semantic change dataset for Russian: RuShiftEval. Its novelty is ensured by a single set of target words annotated for their diachronic semantic shifts across three time periods, while the previous…
The meanings and relationships of words shift over time. This phenomenon is referred to as semantic shift. Research focused on understanding how semantic shifts occur over multiple time periods is essential for gaining a detailed…
The paper introduces manually annotated test sets for the task of tracing diachronic (temporal) semantic shifts in Russian. The two test sets are complementary in that the first one covers comparatively strong semantic changes occurring to…
Recent work has shown that distributed word representations can encode abstract information from child-directed speech. In this paper, we use diachronic distributed word representations to perform temporal modeling and analysis of lexical…
Temporal information conveyed by language describes how the world around us changes through time. Events, durations and times are all temporal elements that can be viewed as intervals. These intervals are sometimes temporally related in…
Random substitutions are a natural generalisation of their classical `deterministic' counterpart, whereby at every step of iterating the substitution, instead of replacing a letter with a predetermined word, every letter is independently…
Terms in diachronic text corpora may exhibit a high degree of semantic dynamics that is only partially captured by the common notion of semantic change. The new measure of context volatility that we propose models the degree by which terms…
We present a probabilistic language model for time-stamped text data which tracks the semantic evolution of individual words over time. The model represents words and contexts by latent trajectories in an embedding space. At each moment in…
Recent work has attempted to characterize the structure of semantic memory and the search algorithms which, together, best approximate human patterns of search revealed in a semantic fluency task. There are a number of models that seek to…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…
We perform an interdisciplinary large-scale evaluation for detecting lexical semantic divergences in a diachronic and in a synchronic task: semantic sense changes across time, and semantic sense changes across domains. Our work addresses…