We propose a framework that extends synchronic polysemy annotation to diachronic changes in lexical meaning, to counteract the lack of resources for evaluating computational models of lexical semantic change. Our framework exploits an intuitive notion of semantic relatedness, and distinguishes between innovative and reductive meaning changes with high interannotator agreement. The resulting test set for German comprises ratings from five annotators for the relatedness of 1,320 use pairs across 22 target words.
This paper explores the informationtheoretic measure entropy to detect metaphoric change, transferring ideas from hypernym detection to research on language change. We also build the first diachronic test set for German as a standard for metaphoric change annotation. Our model shows high performance, is unsupervised, language-independent and generalizable to other processes of semantic change.
The following paper is concerned with information structure in the Ob-Ugric languages and its manifestation in reference tracking and its mechanisms. We will show how both knowledge on information structure and on reference tracking mechanisms can be used to develop a system for a (semi-)automatic annotation of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic functions. We assume that the principles of information structure, i.e., the balancing of the content of an utterance, are indicated by the use of anaphoric devices to mark participants in an on-going discourse. This process in which participants are encoded by the speaker and decoded by the hearer is called reference tracking. Our model distinguishes four important factors that play a role in reference tracking: inherent (linguistic) features of a referent, information structure, referential devices and referential strategies. The interaction between these factors we call reference tracking mechanisms. Here, the passive voice and the dative shift are used to exemplify this complex interaction system. Drawing conclusions from this, rules are developed to annotate both syntactic, semantic and pragmatic roles of discourse participants (semi-)automatically.
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