Between Century and Poet: Graph-Based Lexical Semantic Change in Persian Poetry

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Shahnazari, Kourosh, Ayyoubzadeh, Seyed Moein, Keshtparvar, Mohammadali
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Shahnazari, Kourosh
Ayyoubzadeh, Seyed Moein
Keshtparvar, Mohammadali
author_facet Shahnazari, Kourosh
Ayyoubzadeh, Seyed Moein
Keshtparvar, Mohammadali
contents Meaning in Persian poetry is both historical and relational. Words persist through literary tradition while shifting their force through changing constellations of neighbors, rhetorical frames, and poetic voices. This study examines that process using aligned Word2Vec spaces combined with graph-based neighborhood analysis across centuries and major poets. Rather than modeling semantic change as vector displacement alone, it treats lexical history as the rewiring of local semantic graphs: the gain and loss of neighbors, shifts in bridge roles, and movement across communities. The analysis centers on twenty target words, anchored by five recurrent reference terms: Earth, Night, two wine terms, and Heart. Surrounding them are affective, courtly, elemental, and Sufi concepts such as Love, Sorrow, Dervish, King, Annihilation, and Truth. These words exhibit distinct patterns of change. Night is more time-sensitive, Earth more poet-sensitive, and Heart shows continuity despite graph-role mobility. The two wine terms highlight probe sensitivity: one is broad and semantically diffuse, while the other is narrower and more stable. A lexical audit confirms that the corpus contains historically driven terms, poet-specific usages, and sparsely attested mystical vocabulary requiring caution. Overall, semantic change in Persian poetry is better captured as neighborhood rewiring than as abstract drift. For Digital Humanities, this approach restores local structure to computational analysis and supports interpretations closer to literary practice: persistence, migration, mediation, and selective transformation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06674
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Between Century and Poet: Graph-Based Lexical Semantic Change in Persian Poetry
Shahnazari, Kourosh
Ayyoubzadeh, Seyed Moein
Keshtparvar, Mohammadali
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Meaning in Persian poetry is both historical and relational. Words persist through literary tradition while shifting their force through changing constellations of neighbors, rhetorical frames, and poetic voices. This study examines that process using aligned Word2Vec spaces combined with graph-based neighborhood analysis across centuries and major poets. Rather than modeling semantic change as vector displacement alone, it treats lexical history as the rewiring of local semantic graphs: the gain and loss of neighbors, shifts in bridge roles, and movement across communities. The analysis centers on twenty target words, anchored by five recurrent reference terms: Earth, Night, two wine terms, and Heart. Surrounding them are affective, courtly, elemental, and Sufi concepts such as Love, Sorrow, Dervish, King, Annihilation, and Truth. These words exhibit distinct patterns of change. Night is more time-sensitive, Earth more poet-sensitive, and Heart shows continuity despite graph-role mobility. The two wine terms highlight probe sensitivity: one is broad and semantically diffuse, while the other is narrower and more stable. A lexical audit confirms that the corpus contains historically driven terms, poet-specific usages, and sparsely attested mystical vocabulary requiring caution. Overall, semantic change in Persian poetry is better captured as neighborhood rewiring than as abstract drift. For Digital Humanities, this approach restores local structure to computational analysis and supports interpretations closer to literary practice: persistence, migration, mediation, and selective transformation.
title Between Century and Poet: Graph-Based Lexical Semantic Change in Persian Poetry
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06674