Translating and Evolving: Towards a Model of Language Change in DisCoCat
This addresses the limitation of existing categorical models in linguistics for representing language evolution, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior DisCoCat work.
The paper tackles the problem that the DisCoCat model of meaning fails to model language change, by developing an approach to represent language models and translations within DisCoCat, enabling descriptions of translations between languages or changes within a language.
The categorical compositional distributional (DisCoCat) model of meaning developed by Coecke et al. (2010) has been successful in modeling various aspects of meaning. However, it fails to model the fact that language can change. We give an approach to DisCoCat that allows us to represent language models and translations between them, enabling us to describe translations from one language to another, or changes within the same language. We unify the product space representation given in (Coecke et al., 2010) and the functorial description in (Kartsaklis et al., 2013), in a way that allows us to view a language as a catalogue of meanings. We formalize the notion of a lexicon in DisCoCat, and define a dictionary of meanings between two lexicons. All this is done within the framework of monoidal categories. We give examples of how to apply our methods, and give a concrete suggestion for compositional translation in corpora.