Daniel Hole

Sebastian Pado, Daniel Hole

In this paper, we are concerned with the phenomenon of function word polysemy. We adopt the framework of distributional semantics, which characterizes word meaning by observing occurrence contexts in large corpora and which is in principle well situated to model polysemy. Nevertheless, function words were traditionally considered as impossible to analyze distributionally due to their highly flexible usage patterns. We establish that contextualized word embeddings, the most recent generation of distributional methods, offer hope in this regard. Using the German reflexive pronoun 'sich' as an example, we find that contextualized word embeddings capture theoretically motivated word senses for 'sich' to the extent to which these senses are mirrored systematically in linguistic usage.

Dominik Schlechtweg, Stefanie Eckmann, Enrico Santus et al.

This paper explores the information-theoretic measure entropy to detect metaphoric change, transferring ideas from hypernym detection to research on language change. We also build the first diachronic test set for German as a standard for metaphoric change annotation. Our model shows high performance, is unsupervised, language-independent and generalizable to other processes of semantic change.