The Typology of Polysemy: A Multilingual Distributional Framework
This work addresses the challenge of understanding lexical semantic variation for linguists and computational researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing typological and computational methods.
The paper tackles the problem of quantifying cross-linguistic similarities in polysemy patterns by developing a computational framework that defines a multilingual semantic space for direct comparison of lexical semantics across languages. The results show an intricate interaction between semantic domains and extra-linguistic factors, beyond language phylogeny, that co-shape polysemy typology.
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled investigation of lexical semantics at a much larger scale, but little work has explored lexical typology across semantic domains, nor the factors that influence cross-linguistic similarities. We present a novel computational framework that quantifies semantic affinity, the cross-linguistic similarity of lexical semantics for a concept. Our approach defines a common multilingual semantic space that enables a direct comparison of the lexical expression of concepts across languages. We validate our framework against empirical findings on lexical semantic typology at both the concept and domain levels. Our results reveal an intricate interaction between semantic domains and extra-linguistic factors, beyond language phylogeny, that co-shape the typology of polysemy across languages.