Time-Out: Temporal Referencing for Robust Modeling of Lexical Semantic Change

Dubossarsky, Haim; Hengchen, Simon; Tahmasebi, Nina; Schlechtweg, Dominik

doi:10.18653/v1/p19-1044

Cited by 83 publications

(120 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Properties inherent to language can make a difference, such as the aforementioned re-use of archaic variants from the written record (Section 3), or meaning change, which may reasonably resolve competition between variants as they go on to inhabit different niches (automatic methods exist to detect the latter, cf. Dubossarsky et al 2019). This relates to the issue of determining what variants do and which do not actually compete with one other for the same meaning or function, often referred to in sociolinguistics as the problem of the envelope of variation (cf.…”

Section: Limitations For Linguistic Selection Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora

Karjus

Blythe

Kirby

et al. 2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Newberry et al. (Detecting evolutionary forces in language change, Nature 551, 2017) tackle an important but difficult problem in linguistics, the testing of selective theories of language change against a null model of drift. Having applied a test from population genetics (the Frequency Increment Test) to a number of relevant examples, they suggest stochasticity has a previously under-appreciated role in language evolution. We replicate their results and find that while the overall observation holds, results produced by this approach on individual time series can be sensitive to how the corpus is organized into temporal segments (binning). Furthermore, we use a large set of simulations in conjunction with binning to systematically explore the range of applicability of the Frequency Increment Test. We conclude that care should be exercised with interpreting results of tests like the Frequency Increment Test on individual series, given the researcher degrees of freedom available when applying the test to corpus data, and fundamental differences between genetic and linguistic data. Our findings have implications for selection testing and temporal binning in general, as well as demonstrating the usefulness of simulations for evaluating methods newly introduced to the field.

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Section: Limitations For Linguistic Selection Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora

Karjus

Blythe

Kirby

et al. 2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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show abstract

“…The data used is the same as described in the corresponding section, but with one major adjustment, which is due to my choice of research design appropriate for detecting the change in word meaning and use. Dubossarsky et al (2019) recently demonstrated that the Temporal Referencing technique has significant advantages over other approaches of detecting genuine semantic change. The idea of the method is, first, to focus on a limited set of words whose change is going to be studied.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying Ideational Change in Russian Politics with Topic Models and Word Embeddings

Indukaev

2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

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This chapter applies computational methods of textual analysis to a large corpus of media texts to study ideational change. The empirical focus of the chapter is on the ideas of the political role of innovation, technology, and economic development that were introduced into Russian politics during Medvedev’s presidency. The chapter uses topic modeling, shows the limitations of the method, and provides a more nuanced analysis with the help of word embeddings. The latter method is used to analyze semantic change and to capture complex semantic relationships between the studied concepts.

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“…Lexical semantic change has been studied with word embeddings [8]. The authors suggest that word embeddings should not be aligned when used to study semantic change, as such an alignment introduces noise.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Plenipotentiary to Puddingless: Users and Uses of New Words in Early English Letters

Säily¹,

Mäkelä²,

Hämäläinen³

2021

Multilingual Facilitation

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We study neologism use in two samples of early English correspon- dence, from 1640–1660 and 1760–1780. Of especial interest are the early adopters of new vocabulary, the social groups they represent, and the types and functions of their neologisms. We describe our computerassisted approach and note the difficulties associated with massive variation in the corpus. Our findings include that while male letterwriters tend to use neologisms more frequently than women, the eighteenth century seems to have provided more opportunities for women and the lower ranks to participate in neologism use as well. In both samples, neologisms most frequently occur in letters written between close friends, which could be due to this less stable relationship triggering more creative language use. In the seventeenthcentury sample, we observe the influence of the English Civil War, while the eighteenthcentury sample appears to reflect the changing functions of letterwriting, as correspondence is increasingly being used as a tool for building and maintaining social relationships in addition to exchanging information.

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Time-Out: Temporal Referencing for Robust Modeling of Lexical Semantic Change

Cited by 83 publications

References 31 publications

Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora

Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora

Studying Ideational Change in Russian Politics with Topic Models and Word Embeddings

From Plenipotentiary to Puddingless: Users and Uses of New Words in Early English Letters

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