Elena Spaziani
2026
Elections go bananas: A First Large-scale Multilingual Study of Pluralia Tantum using LLMs
Elena Spaziani | Kamyar Zeinalipour | Pierluigi Cassotti | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Elena Spaziani | Kamyar Zeinalipour | Pierluigi Cassotti | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In this paper, we study the expansion of pluralia tantum, i.e., defective nouns which lack a singular form, like scissors. We base our work on an annotation framework specifically developed for the study of lexicalization of pluralia tantum, namely Lexicalization profiles. On a corresponding hand-annotated testset, we show that the OpenAI and DeepSeek models provide useful annotators for semantic, syntactic and sense categories, with accuracy ranging from 51% to 89%, averaged across all feature groups and languages. Next, we turn to a large-scale investigation of pluralia tantum. Using dictionaries, we extract candidate words for Italian, Russian and English and keep those for which the changing ratio of singular and plural form is evident in a corresponding reference corpus. We use an LLM to annotate each instance from the reference corpora according to the annotation framework. We show that the large amount of automatically annotated sentences for each feature can be used to perform in-depth linguistic analysis. Focusing on the correlation between an annotated feature and the grammatical form (singular vs. plural), patterns of morpho-semantic change are noted.
The Proceedings for the 6th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Change (LChange’26)
Nina Tahmasebi | Pierluigi Cassotti | Syrielle Montariol | Andrey Kutuzov | Netta Huebscher | Elena Spaziani | Naomi Baes
The Proceedings for the 6th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Change (LChange’26)
Nina Tahmasebi | Pierluigi Cassotti | Syrielle Montariol | Andrey Kutuzov | Netta Huebscher | Elena Spaziani | Naomi Baes
The Proceedings for the 6th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Change (LChange’26)
2024
AXOLOTL’24 Shared Task on Multilingual Explainable Semantic Change Modeling
Mariia Fedorova | Timothee Mickus | Niko Partanen | Janine Siewert | Elena Spaziani | Andrey Kutuzov
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Mariia Fedorova | Timothee Mickus | Niko Partanen | Janine Siewert | Elena Spaziani | Andrey Kutuzov
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change