Activities per year
Abstract
Word meaning changes over time, depending on linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Associating a word's correct meaning in its historical context is a central challenge in diachronic research, and is relevant to a range of NLP tasks, including information retrieval and semantic search in historical texts. Bayesian models for semantic change have emerged as a powerful tool to address this challenge, providing explicit and interpretable representations of semantic change phenomena. However, while corpora typically come with rich metadata, existing models are limited by their inability to exploit contextual information (such as text genre) beyond the document time-stamp. This is particularly critical in the case of ancient languages, where lack of data and long diachronic span make it harder to draw a clear distinction between polysemy (the fact that a word has several senses) and semantic change (the process of acquiring, losing, or changing senses), and current systems perform poorly on these languages. We develop GASC, a dynamic semantic change model that leverages categorical metadata about the texts' genre to boost inference and uncover the evolution of meanings in Ancient Greek corpora. In a new evaluation framework, our model achieves improved predictive performance compared to the state of the art.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change : Proceedings of the Workshop |
Number of pages | 11 |
Place of Publication | Stroudsburg |
Publisher | ACL |
Publication date | Jul 2019 |
Pages | 56-66 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-950737-31-4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2019 |
MoE publication type | A4 Article in conference proceedings |
Event | International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change - Florence, Italy Duration: 2 Aug 2019 → 2 Aug 2019 Conference number: 1 |
Fields of Science
- 112 Statistics and probability
- 6121 Languages
Activities
-
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Simon Hengchen (Attendee)
28 Jul 2019 → 2 Aug 2019Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Organisation and participation in conferences, workshops, courses, seminars
-
The Alan Turing Institute
Simon Hengchen (Visiting researcher)
8 May 2018 → 15 May 2018Activity: Visiting an external institution types › Academic visit to other institution
-
The Alan Turing Institute
Simon Hengchen (Visiting researcher)
9 Apr 2018 → 13 Apr 2018Activity: Visiting an external institution types › Academic visit to other institution