EvoSem: A database of polysemous cognate sets
Mathieu Dehouck, Alex François, Siva Kalyan, Martial Pastor, David Kletz
Abstract
Polysemies, or “colexifications”, are of great interest in cognitive and historical linguistics, since meanings that are frequently expressed by the same lexeme are likely to be conceptually similar, and lie along a common pathway of semantic change. We argue that these types of inferences can be more reliably drawn from polysemies of cognate sets (which we call “dialexifications”) than from polysemies of lexemes. After giving a precise definition of dialexification, we introduce Evosem, a cross-linguistic database of etymologies scraped from several online sources. Based on this database, we measure for each pair of senses how many cognate sets include them both — i.e. how often this pair of senses is “dialexified”. This allows us to construct a weighted dialexification graph for any set of senses, indicating the conceptual and historical closeness of each pair. We also present an online interface for browsing our database, including graphs and interactive tables. We then discuss potential applications to NLP tasks and to linguistic research.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.lchange-1.7
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Nina Tahmasebi, Syrielle Montariol, Haim Dubossarsky, Andrey Kutuzov, Simon Hengchen, David Alfter, Francesco Periti, Pierluigi Cassotti
- Venue:
- LChange
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 66–75
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.lchange-1.7
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.lchange-1.7
- Cite (ACL):
- Mathieu Dehouck, Alex François, Siva Kalyan, Martial Pastor, and David Kletz. 2023. EvoSem: A database of polysemous cognate sets. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 66–75, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- EvoSem: A database of polysemous cognate sets (Dehouck et al., LChange 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2023.lchange-1.7.pdf