Joey Chuang


2024

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Homophone2Vec: Embedding Space Analysis for Empirical Evaluation of Phonological and Semantic Similarity
Sophie Wu | Anita Zheng | Joey Chuang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)

This paper introduces a novel method for empirically evaluating the relationship between the phonological and semantic similarity of linguistic units using embedding spaces. Chinese character homophones are used as a proof-of-concept. We employ cosine similarity as a proxy for semantic similarity between characters, and compare relationships between phonologically-related characters and baseline characters (chosen as similar-frequency characters). We show there is a strongly statistically significant positive semantic relationship among different Chinese characters at varying levels of sound-sharing. We also perform some basic probing using t-SNE and UMAP visualizations, and indicate directions for future applications of this method.
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