Moran Mizrahi


2020

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Coming to Terms: Automatic Formation of Neologisms in Hebrew
Moran Mizrahi | Stav Yardeni Seelig | Dafna Shahaf
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Spoken languages are ever-changing, with new words entering them all the time. However, coming up with new words (neologisms) today relies exclusively on human creativity. In this paper we propose a system to automatically suggest neologisms. We focus on the Hebrew language as a test case due to the unusual regularity of its noun formation. User studies comparing our algorithm to experts and non-experts demonstrate that our algorithm is capable of generating high-quality outputs, as well as enhance human creativity. More broadly, we seek to inspire more computational work around the topic of linguistic creativity, which we believe offers numerous unexplored opportunities.