Coming to Terms: Automatic Formation of Neologisms in Hebrew

Moran Mizrahi, Stav Yardeni Seelig, Dafna Shahaf


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.442
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4918–4929
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.442
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.442
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Moran Mizrahi, Stav Yardeni Seelig, and Dafna Shahaf. 2020. Coming to Terms: Automatic Formation of Neologisms in Hebrew. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 4918–4929, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Coming to Terms: Automatic Formation of Neologisms in Hebrew (Mizrahi et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2020.findings-emnlp.442.pdf
Code
 stardeni36/coming-to-terms-automatic-formation-of-neologisms-in-hebrew