Computational modeling of semantic change
Pierluigi Cassotti, Francesco Periti, Stefano de Pascale, Haim Dubossarsky, Nina Tahmasebi
Abstract
Languages change constantly over time, influenced by social, technological, cultural and political factors that affect how people express themselves. In particular, words can undergo the process of semantic change, which can be subtle and significantly impact the interpretation of texts. For example, the word terrific used to mean ‘causing terror’ and was as such synonymous to terrifying. Nowadays, speakers use the word in the sense of ‘excessive’ and even ‘amazing’. In Historical Linguistics, tools and methods have been developed to analyse this phenomenon, including systematic categorisations of the types of change, the causes and the mechanisms underlying the different types of change. However, traditional linguistic methods, while informative, are often based on small, carefully curated samples. Thanks to the availability of both large diachronic corpora, the computational means to model word meaning unsupervised, and evaluation benchmarks, we are seeing an increasing interest in the computational modelling of semantic change. This is evidenced by the increasing number of publications in this new domain as well as the organisation of initiatives and events related to this topic, such as four editions of the International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change LChange1, and several evaluation campaigns (Schlechtweg et al., 2020a; Basile et al., 2020b; Kutuzov et al.; Zamora-Reina et al., 2022).- Anthology ID:
- 2024.eacl-tutorials.1
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St. Julian’s, Malta
- Editors:
- Mohsen Mesgar, Sharid Loáiciga
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1–8
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-tutorials.1
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Pierluigi Cassotti, Francesco Periti, Stefano de Pascale, Haim Dubossarsky, and Nina Tahmasebi. 2024. Computational modeling of semantic change. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts, pages 1–8, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Computational modeling of semantic change (Cassotti et al., EACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2024.eacl-tutorials.1.pdf