Short-term Semantic Shifts and their Relation to Frequency Change

Anna Marakasova, Julia Neidhardt


Abstract
We present ongoing research on the relationship between short-term semantic shifts and frequency change patterns by examining the case of the refugee crisis in Austria from 2015 to 2016. Our experiments are carried out on a diachronic corpus of Austrian German, namely a corpus of newspaper articles. We trace the evolution of the usage of words that represent concepts in the context of the refugee crisis by analyzing cosine similarities of word vectors over time as well as similarities based on the words’ nearest neighbourhood sets. In order to investigate how exactly the contextual meanings have changed, we measure cosine similarity between the following pairs of words: words describing the refugee crisis, on the one hand, and words indicating the process of mediatization and politicization of the refugee crisis in Austria proposed by a domain expert, on the other hand. We evaluate our approach against the expert knowledge. The paper presents the current findings and outlines the directions of the future work.
Anthology ID:
2020.pam-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020)
Month:
June
Year:
2020
Address:
Gothenburg
Editors:
Christine Howes, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Adam Ek, Vidya Somashekarappa
Venue:
PaM
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
146–153
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.pam-1.18
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Marakasova and Julia Neidhardt. 2020. Short-term Semantic Shifts and their Relation to Frequency Change. In Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020), pages 146–153, Gothenburg. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Short-term Semantic Shifts and their Relation to Frequency Change (Marakasova & Neidhardt, PaM 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.pam-1.18.pdf