Cultural Shift or Linguistic Drift? Comparing Two Computational Measures of Semantic Change

Abstract

Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying causes. Here we show how two different distributional measures can be used to detect two different types of semantic change. The first measure, which has been used in many previous works, analyzes global shifts in a word's distributional semantics, it is sensitive to changes due to regular processes of linguistic drift, such as the semantic generalization of promise ("I promise." -> "It promised to be exciting."). The second measure, which we develop here, focuses on local changes to a word's nearest semantic neighbors; it is more sensitive to cultural shifts, such as the change in the meaning of cell ("prison cell" -> "cell phone"). Comparing measurements made by these two methods allows researchers to determine whether changes are more cultural or linguistic in nature, a distinction that is essential for work in the digital humanities and historical linguistics.

5 pages, 3 figures, EMNLP 2016

References in corpus (3)

• From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics
• Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change
• Temporal Analysis of Language through Neural Language Models

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Multi-level computational methods for interdisciplinary research in the HathiTrust Digital Library
• Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora
• Words are Malleable: Computing Semantic Shifts in Political and Media Discourse
• Same Words, Different Meanings: Semantic Polarization in Broadcast Media Language Forecasts Polarization on Social Media Discourse
• Detecting Reliable Novel Word Senses: A Network-Centric Approach