Computational approaches to semantic change Simon Hengchen, Yang Xu, Nina Tahmasebi, Adam Jatowt, Lars Borin. Volume 6

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hengchen, Simon, editor.

Xu, Yang, editor.

Tahmasebi, Nina, editor.

Jatowt, Adam, editor.

Borin, Lars, editor.

Series:

Language Variation

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language arts.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (396 p.)

Place of Publication:

Language Science Press 2021

Berlin : Language Science Press, 2021.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Semantic change - how the meanings of words change over time - has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans.

Notes:

CC BY

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9783985540082

398554008X

Publisher Number:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5040241