| Challenge: | Existing studies on lexical decline suggest that cognitive and linguistic factors play a role in the survival of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. |
| Approach: | They propose a variety of psycholinguistic factors that are predictive of lexical decline, in which words greatly decrease in frequency over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed factors show significant differences in the expected direction between each curated set of declining words and their matched stable words. |
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| Challenge: | In an online community, new words come and go, but language change is shaped and constrained by the grammatical system in which it takes part. |
| Approach: | They analysed the frequency of non-standard words in reddit to determine their impact on language change. |
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Analysing Lexical Semantic Change with Contextualised Word Representations (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on lexical semantic change have focused on detecting and characterising word meaning shifts using distributional semantic models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word usages, clusters these representations into usage types, and measures change along time with three proposed metrics. |
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A Multidimensional Framework for Evaluating Lexical Semantic Change with Social Science Applications (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Historical linguists have identified multiple forms of lexical semantic change. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for integrating and evaluating lexical semantic changes in historical linguists and a unified computational methodology for evaluating them concurrently. |
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Do Language Models Exhibit Human-like Structural Priming Effects? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a recent exposure to a structure facilitates processing of the same structure, a study finds . structural priming is well attested in humans, for both language production and comprehension . |
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Computational modeling of semantic change (2024.eacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | Languages change constantly over time, influenced by social, technological, cultural and political factors that affect how people express themselves. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorise the types of change, the causes and the mechanisms underlying the different types of changes using large diachronic corpora and evaluation benchmarks. |
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A Wind of Change: Detecting and Evaluating Lexical Semantic Change across Times and Domains (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for diachronic and synchronic detection of lexical semantic divergences are superficial and lack of comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend benchmark models on a common state-of-the-art evaluation task . they also demonstrate that the same evaluation task and modelling approaches can be utilised for synchronic detection of domain-specific sense divergences in the field of term extraction. |
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The structure of online social networks modulates the rate of lexical change (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | lexical change is a prevalent process, as new words are added, thrive, and decline in day-to-day usage. |
| Approach: | They conduct a large-scale analysis of over 80k neologisms in 4420 online communities over a decade and found that the community’s network structure plays a significant role in lexical change. |
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Diachronic degradation of language models: Insights from social media (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored whether and how language models degrade over time, i.e. why they fail to work on contemporary language. |
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Why is penguin more similar to polar bear than to sea gull? Analyzing conceptual knowledge in distributional models (2020.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Several analysis methods have been shown to be limited and are not well understood . thesis aims to understand distributional semantic representations based on linguistic data . |
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The Road to Success: Assessing the Fate of Linguistic Innovations in Online Communities (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | a longitudinal study of online social networks investigates the birth and spread of lexical innovations. |
| Approach: | They investigate the birth and diffusion of lexical innovations in online communities . they build on sociolinguistic theories and focus on the relationship between the spread of a new term and the social role of the individuals who use it . |
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