@article{cassotti-tahmasebi-2025-sense,
    title = "Sense-specific Historical Word Usage Generation",
    author = "Cassotti, Pierluigi  and
      Tahmasebi, Nina",
    journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    volume = "13",
    year = "2025",
    address = "Cambridge, MA",
    publisher = "MIT Press",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-07/2025.tacl-1.32/",
    doi = "10.1162/tacl_a_00761",
    pages = "690--708",
    abstract = "Large-scale sense-annotated corpora are important for a range of tasks but are hard to come by. Dictionaries that record and describe the vocabulary of a language often offer a small set of real-world example sentences for each sense of a word. However, on their own, these sentences are too few to be used as diachronic sense-annotated corpora. We propose a targeted strategy for training and evaluating generative models producing historically and semantically accurate word usages given any word, sense definition, and year triple. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuned models can generate usages with the same properties as real-world example sentences from a reference dictionary. Thus the generated usages will be suitable for training and testing computational models where large-scale sense-annotated corpora are needed but currently unavailable."
}