@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2025-nellcom,
title = "{N}e{LLC}om-Lex: A Neural-agent Framework to Study the Interplay between Lexical Systems and Language Use",
author = {Zhang, Yuqing and
{\"U}rker, Ecesu and
Verhoef, Tessa and
Boleda, Gemma and
Bisazza, Arianna},
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.580/",
pages = "10929--10945",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
abstract = "Lexical semantic change has primarily been investigated with observational and experimental methods; however, observational methods (corpus analysis, distributional semantic modeling) cannot get at causal mechanisms, and experimental paradigms with humans are hard to apply to semantic change due to the extended diachronic processes involved. This work introduces NeLLCom-Lex, a neural-agent framework designed to simulate semantic change by first grounding agents in a real lexical system (e.g. English) and then systematically manipulating their communicative needs. Using a well-established color naming task, we simulate the evolution of a lexical system within a single generation, and study which factors lead agents to: (i) develop human-like naming behavior and lexicons, and (ii) change their behavior and lexicons according to their communicative needs. Our experiments with different supervised and reinforcement learning pipelines show that neural agents trained to `speak' an existing language can reproduce human-like patterns in color naming to a remarkable extent, supporting the further use of NeLLCom-Lex to elucidate the mechanisms of semantic change."
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<abstract>Lexical semantic change has primarily been investigated with observational and experimental methods; however, observational methods (corpus analysis, distributional semantic modeling) cannot get at causal mechanisms, and experimental paradigms with humans are hard to apply to semantic change due to the extended diachronic processes involved. This work introduces NeLLCom-Lex, a neural-agent framework designed to simulate semantic change by first grounding agents in a real lexical system (e.g. English) and then systematically manipulating their communicative needs. Using a well-established color naming task, we simulate the evolution of a lexical system within a single generation, and study which factors lead agents to: (i) develop human-like naming behavior and lexicons, and (ii) change their behavior and lexicons according to their communicative needs. Our experiments with different supervised and reinforcement learning pipelines show that neural agents trained to ‘speak’ an existing language can reproduce human-like patterns in color naming to a remarkable extent, supporting the further use of NeLLCom-Lex to elucidate the mechanisms of semantic change.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T NeLLCom-Lex: A Neural-agent Framework to Study the Interplay between Lexical Systems and Language Use
%A Zhang, Yuqing
%A Ürker, Ecesu
%A Verhoef, Tessa
%A Boleda, Gemma
%A Bisazza, Arianna
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-335-7
%F zhang-etal-2025-nellcom
%X Lexical semantic change has primarily been investigated with observational and experimental methods; however, observational methods (corpus analysis, distributional semantic modeling) cannot get at causal mechanisms, and experimental paradigms with humans are hard to apply to semantic change due to the extended diachronic processes involved. This work introduces NeLLCom-Lex, a neural-agent framework designed to simulate semantic change by first grounding agents in a real lexical system (e.g. English) and then systematically manipulating their communicative needs. Using a well-established color naming task, we simulate the evolution of a lexical system within a single generation, and study which factors lead agents to: (i) develop human-like naming behavior and lexicons, and (ii) change their behavior and lexicons according to their communicative needs. Our experiments with different supervised and reinforcement learning pipelines show that neural agents trained to ‘speak’ an existing language can reproduce human-like patterns in color naming to a remarkable extent, supporting the further use of NeLLCom-Lex to elucidate the mechanisms of semantic change.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.580/
%P 10929-10945
Markdown (Informal)
[NeLLCom-Lex: A Neural-agent Framework to Study the Interplay between Lexical Systems and Language Use](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.580/) (Zhang et al., Findings 2025)
ACL