Outta control: Laws of semantic change and inherent biases in word representation models

Haim Dubossarsky, Eitan Grossman, Daphna Weinshall

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

105 Scopus citations

Abstract

This article evaluates three proposed laws of semantic change. Our claim is that in order to validate a putative law of semantic change, the effect should be observed in the genuine condition but absent or reduced in a suitably matched control condition, in which no change can possibly have taken place. Our analysis shows that the effects reported in recent literature must be substantially revised: (i) the proposed negative correlation between meaning change and word frequency is shown to be largely an artefact of the models of word representation used; (ii) the proposed negative correlation between meaning change and prototypicality is shown to be much weaker than what has been claimed in prior art; and (iii) the proposed positive correlation between meaning change and polysemy is largely an artefact of word frequency. These empirical observations are corroborated by analytical proofs that show that count representations introduce an inherent dependence on word frequency, and thus word frequency cannot be evaluated as an independent factor with these representations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2017 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1136-1145
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781945626838
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Event2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2017 - Copenhagen, Denmark
Duration: 9 Sep 201711 Sep 2017

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2017 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings

Conference

Conference2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2017
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityCopenhagen
Period9/09/1711/09/17

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Association for Computational Linguistics.

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