German in Flux: Detecting Metaphoric Change via Word Entropy

Schlechtweg, Dominik; Eckmann, Stefanie; Santus, Enrico; Walde, Sabine Schulte im; Hole, Daniel

doi:10.48550/arxiv.1706.04971

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…This research broadly falls into two categories. On the one hand, methods proposals and critiques accompanied by exploratory results (Dubossarsky et al, 2017;Frermann and Lapata, 2016;Gulordava and Baroni, 2011;Hamilton et al, 2016b;Jatowt and Duh, 2014;Kulkarni et al, 2015;Sagi et al, 2011;Schlechtweg et al, 2017;Wijaya and Yeniterzi, 2011). On the other, applications of these methods, usually with more specific linguistic questions in mind (Dautriche et al, 2016;Dubossarsky et al, 2016;Hamilton et al, 2016a;Perek, 2016;Rodda et al, 2016;Xu and Kemp, 2015).…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the dynamics of topical fluctuations in language

et al. 2020

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Abstract 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 in texts, with changes in frequency taken to reflect the popularity or selective fitness of an element. However, corpus frequencies may change for a wide variety of reasons, including purely random sampling effects, or because corpora are composed of contemporary media and fiction texts within which the underlying topics ebb and flow with cultural and socio-political trends. In this work, we introduce a simple model for controlling for topical fluctuations in corpora—the topical-cultural advection model—and demonstrate how it provides a robust baseline of variability in word frequency changes over time. We validate the model on a diachronic corpus spanning two centuries, and a carefully-controlled artificial language change scenario, and then use it to correct for topical fluctuations in historical time series. Finally, we use the model to show that the emergence of new words typically corresponds with the rise of a trending topic. This suggests that some lexical innovations occur due to growing communicative need in a subspace of the lexicon, and that the topical-cultural advection model can be used to quantify this.

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