Modeling the Evolution of Word Senses with Force-Directed Layouts of Co-occurrence Networks

Tim Reke, Robert Schwanhold, Ralf Krestel


Abstract
Languages evolve over time and the meaning of words can shift. Furthermore, individual words can have multiple senses. However, existing language models often only reflect one word sense per word and do not reflect semantic changes over time. While there are language models that can either model semantic change of words or multiple word senses, none of them cover both aspects simultaneously. We propose a novel force-directed graph layout algorithm to draw a network of frequently co-occurring words. In this way, we are able to use the drawn graph to visualize the evolution of word senses. In addition, we hope that jointly modeling semantic change and multiple senses of words results in improvements for the individual tasks.
Anthology ID:
2021.lchange-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen, Syrielle Montariol, Haim Dubossarsky
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
58–63
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.lchange-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.lchange-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tim Reke, Robert Schwanhold, and Ralf Krestel. 2021. Modeling the Evolution of Word Senses with Force-Directed Layouts of Co-occurrence Networks. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021, pages 58–63, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling the Evolution of Word Senses with Force-Directed Layouts of Co-occurrence Networks (Reke et al., LChange 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.lchange-1.8.pdf