Ireland

Language change has often been conceived as a competition between linguistic variants. However, language units may be complex organizations in themselves, e.g. in the case of schematic constructions, featuring a free slot. Such a slot is filled by words forming a set or &#39;paradigm&#39; and engaging in inter-related dynamics within this constructional environment. To tackle this complexity, a simple computational method is offered to automatically characterize their interactions, and visualize them through networks of cooperation and competition. Applying this method to the French paradigm of quantifiers, I show that this method efficiently captures phenomena regarding the evolving organization of constructional paradigms, in particular the constitution of competing clusters of fillers that promote different semantic strategies overall.

ACL 2022

From qualifiers to quantifiers: semantic shift at the paradigm level

corpus data

paradigmatic organization

language change

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Language change has often been conceived as a competition between linguistic variants. However, language units may be complex organizations in themselves, e.g. in the case of schematic constructions, featuring a free slot. Such a slot is filled by words forming a set or 'paradigm' and engaging in inter-related dynamics within this constructional environment. To tackle this complexity, a simple computational method is offered to automatically characterize their interactions, and visualize them through networks of cooperation and competition. Applying this method to the French paradigm of quantifiers, I show that this method efficiently captures phenomena regarding the evolving organization of constructional paradigms, in particular the constitution of competing clusters of fillers that promote different semantic strategies overall.

workshop paper

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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Morphological and syntactic changes in word usage --- as captured, e.g., by grammatical profiles --- have been shown to be good predictors of a word's meaning change. In this work, we explore whether large pre-trained contextualised language models, a common tool for lexical semantic change detection, are sensitive to such morphosyntactic changes. To this end, we first compare the performance of grammatical profiles against that of a multilingual neural language model (XLM-R) on 10 datasets, covering 7 languages, and then combine the two approaches in ensembles to assess their complementarity. Our results show that ensembling grammatical profiles with XLM-R improves semantic change detection performance for most datasets and languages. This indicates that language models do not fully cover the fine-grained morphological and syntactic signals that are explicitly represented in grammatical profiles.


Do Not Fire the Linguist: Grammatical Profiles Help Language Models Detect Semantic Change

In this paper, we describe a BERT model trained on the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) dataset of digitized documents. The ECCO dataset poses unique modelling challenges due to the presence of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) artifacts. We establish the performance of the BERT model on a publication year prediction task against linear baseline models and human judgement, finding the BERT model to be superior to both and able to date the works, on average, with less than 7 years absolute error. We also explore how language change over time affects the model by analyzing the features the model uses for publication year predictions as given by the Integrated Gradients model explanation method.

Explainable Publication Year Prediction of Eighteenth Century Texts with the BERT Model

Cognates and borrowings carry different aspects of etymological evolution. In this work, we study semantic change of such items using multilingual word embeddings, both static and contextualised. We underline caveats identified while building and evaluating these embeddings. We release both said embeddings and a newly-built historical words lexicon, containing typed relations between words of varied Romance languages.

Caveats of Measuring Semantic Change of Cognates and Borrowings using Multilingual Word Embeddings

Recent research has brought a wind of using computational approaches to the classic topic of semantic change, aiming to tackle one of the most challenging issues in the evolution of human language. While several methods for detecting semantic change have been proposed, such studies are limited to a few languages, where evaluation datasets are available. This paper presents the first dataset for evaluating Chinese semantic change in contexts preceding and following the Reform and Opening-up, covering a 50-year period in Modern Chinese. Following the DURel framework, we collected 6,000 human judgments for the dataset. We also reported the performance of alignment-based word embedding models on this evaluation dataset, achieving high and significant correlation scores.

Lexicon of Changes: Towards the Evaluation of Diachronic Semantic Shift in Chinese

We compare five Low Saxon dialects from the 19th and 21st century from Germany and the Netherlands with each other as well as with modern Standard Dutch and Standard German. Our comparison is based on character n-grams on the one hand and PoS n-grams on the other and we show that these two lead to different distances. Particularly in the PoS-based distances, one can observe all of the 21st century Low Saxon dialects shifting towards the modern majority languages.

Low Saxon dialect distances at the orthographic and syntactic level

Languages can respond to external events in various ways - the creation of new words or named entities, additional senses might develop for already existing words or the valence of words can change. In this work, we explore the semantic shift of the Dutch words "natie" ("nation"), "volk" ("people") and "vaderland" ("fatherland") over a period that is known for the rise of nationalism in Europe: 1700-1880. The semantic change is measured by means of Dynamic Bernoulli Word Embeddings which allow for comparison between word embeddings over different time slices. The word embeddings were generated based on Dutch fiction literature divided over different decades. From the analysis of the absolute drifts, it appears that the word "natie" underwent a relatively small drift. However, the drifts of "vaderland'" and "volk"' show multiple peaks, culminating around the turn of the nineteenth century. To verify whether this semantic change can indeed be attributed to nationalistic movements, a detailed analysis of the nearest neighbours of the target words is provided. From the analysis, it appears that "natie", "volk" and "vaderlan"' became more nationalistically-loaded over time.

"Vaderland", "Volk" and "Natie": Semantic Change Related to Nationalism in Dutch Literature Between 1700 and 1880 Captured with Dynamic Bernoulli Word Embeddings

We explore context change of lexical words on a new dataset, which includes tweets from before and after the COVID-related lockdown in April 2020. We define topics or themes of tweets as contexts of lexical words and experiment with neural topic models to track context shifts of these words. We show that this approach can reveal
global meaning change of words as opposed to local meaning change.

Using neural topic models to track context shifts of words: a case study of COVID-related terms before and after the lockdown in April 2020

The use of word embeddings is an important NLP technique for extracting meaningful conclusions from corpora of human text. One important question that has been raised about word embeddings is the degree of gender bias learned from corpora. Bolukbasi et al. (2016) proposed an important technique for quantifying gender bias in word embeddings that, at its heart, is lexically based and relies on sets of highly gendered word pairs (e.g., mother/father and madam/sir) and a list of professions words (e.g., doctor and nurse). In this paper, we document problems that arise with this method to quantify gender bias in diachronic corpora. Focusing on Arabic and Chinese corpora, in particular, we document clear changes in profession words used over time and, somewhat surprisingly, even changes in the simpler gendered defining set word pairs. We further document complications in languages such as Arabic, where many words are highly polysemous/homonymous, especially female professions words.

Roadblocks in Gender Bias Measurement for Diachronic Corpora

Dependency parsing is a method for doing surface-level syntactic analysis on natural language texts. The scarcity of any viable tools for doing these tasks in Dravidian Languages has introduced a new line of research into these topics. This paper focuses on a novel approach that uses word-to-word dependency tagging using BERT models to improve the malt parser performance. We used Tamil, a morphologically rich and free word order language. The individual words are tokenized using BERT models and the dependency relations are recognized using Machine Learning Algorithms. Oversampling algorithms such as SMOTE (Chawla et al., 2002) and ADASYN (He et al., 2008) are used to tackle data imbalance and consequently improve parsing results. The results obtained after oversampling (label accuracy of 69.94% IndicBERT-SVM) are used in the malt parser and this can be accustomed to further highlight that featurebased approaches can be used for such tasks.

BERT-Based Sequence Labelling Approach for Dependency Parsing in Tamil

Increased use of online social media sites has given rise to tremendous amounts of user generated data. Social media sites have become a platform where users express and voice their opinions in a real-time environment. Social media sites such as Twitter limit the number of characters used to express a thought in a tweet, leading to increased use of creative, humorous and confusing language in order to convey the message. Due to this, automatic humor detection has become a difficult task, especially for low-resource languages such as the Dravidian languages. Humor detection has been a well studied area for resource rich languages due to the availability of rich and accurate data. In this paper, we have attempted to solve this issue by working on low-resource languages, such as, Telugu, a Dravidian language, by collecting and annotating Telugu tweets and performing automatic humor detection on the collected data. We experimented on the corpus using various transformer models such as Multilingual BERT, Multilingual DistillBERT and XLM-RoBERTa to establish a baseline classification system. We concluded that XLM-RoBERTa was the best-performing model and it achieved an F1-score of 0.82 with 81.5% accuracy.

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Do Not Fire the Linguist: Grammatical Profiles Help Language Models Detect Semantic Change

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