An Embedded Diachronic Sense Change Model with a Case Study from Ancient Greek

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zafar, Schyan, Nicholls, Geoff K.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Zafar, Schyan
Nicholls, Geoff K.
author_facet Zafar, Schyan
Nicholls, Geoff K.
contents Word meanings change over time, and word senses evolve, emerge or die out in the process. For ancient languages, where the corpora are often small and sparse, modelling such changes accurately proves challenging, and quantifying uncertainty in sense-change estimates consequently becomes important. GASC (Genre-Aware Semantic Change) and DiSC (Diachronic Sense Change) are existing generative models that have been used to analyse sense change for target words from an ancient Greek text corpus, using unsupervised learning without the help of any pre-training. These models represent the senses of a given target word such as "kosmos" (meaning decoration, order or world) as distributions over context words, and sense prevalence as a distribution over senses. The models are fitted using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to measure temporal changes in these representations. This paper introduces EDiSC, an Embedded DiSC model, which combines word embeddings with DiSC to provide superior model performance. It is shown empirically that EDiSC offers improved predictive accuracy, ground-truth recovery and uncertainty quantification, as well as better sampling efficiency and scalability properties with MCMC methods. The challenges of fitting these models are also discussed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_00541
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Embedded Diachronic Sense Change Model with a Case Study from Ancient Greek
Zafar, Schyan
Nicholls, Geoff K.
Computation and Language
Methodology
Word meanings change over time, and word senses evolve, emerge or die out in the process. For ancient languages, where the corpora are often small and sparse, modelling such changes accurately proves challenging, and quantifying uncertainty in sense-change estimates consequently becomes important. GASC (Genre-Aware Semantic Change) and DiSC (Diachronic Sense Change) are existing generative models that have been used to analyse sense change for target words from an ancient Greek text corpus, using unsupervised learning without the help of any pre-training. These models represent the senses of a given target word such as "kosmos" (meaning decoration, order or world) as distributions over context words, and sense prevalence as a distribution over senses. The models are fitted using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to measure temporal changes in these representations. This paper introduces EDiSC, an Embedded DiSC model, which combines word embeddings with DiSC to provide superior model performance. It is shown empirically that EDiSC offers improved predictive accuracy, ground-truth recovery and uncertainty quantification, as well as better sampling efficiency and scalability properties with MCMC methods. The challenges of fitting these models are also discussed.
title An Embedded Diachronic Sense Change Model with a Case Study from Ancient Greek
topic Computation and Language
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00541