Hamilton William L, Leskovec Jure, Jurafsky Dan
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford CA, 94305.
Proc Conf Empir Methods Nat Lang Process. 2016 Nov;2016:2116-2121. doi: 10.18653/v1/d16-1229.
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 ("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 ("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.
词汇意义发生变化的原因有很多，包括新技术等文化因素以及主观化等常规语言过程。理解语言和文化的演变需要理清这些潜在原因。在这里，我们展示了如何使用两种不同的分布度量来检测两种不同类型的语义变化。第一种度量方法，在许多先前的研究中都有使用，它分析一个词的分布语义中的全局变化；它对由于语言漂移的常规过程导致的变化敏感，比如“promise”（“我承诺。”“它预示着会很刺激。”）的语义泛化。我们在此开发的第二种度量方法，关注一个词最邻近语义邻居的局部变化；它对文化转变更敏感，比如“cell”（“牢房”“手机”）意义的变化。比较这两种方法所做的测量，能让研究人员确定变化本质上更多是文化性的还是语言性的，这一区分对于数字人文和历史语言学研究至关重要。
