Using relative entropy for detection and analysis of periods of diachronic linguistic change
We present a data-driven approach to detect periods of linguistic change and the lexical and grammatical features contributing to change. We focus on the development of scientific English in the late modern period. Our approach is based on relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler Divergence) comparing temporally adjacent periods and sliding over the time line from past to present. Using a diachronic corpus of scientific publications of the Royal Society of London, we show how periods of change reflect the interplay between lexis and grammar, where periods of lexical expansion are typically followed by periods of grammatical consolidation resulting in a balance between expressivity and communicative efficiency. Our method is generic and can be applied to other data sets, languages and time ranges.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Three-part diachronic semantic change dataset for Russian
We present a manually annotated lexical semantic change dataset for Russian: RuShiftEval. Its novelty is ensured by a single set of target words annotated for their diachronic semantic shifts across three time periods, w…
Change DetectionStylistic variation over 200 years of court proceedings according to gender and social class
We present an approach to detect stylistic variation across social variables (here: gender and social class), considering also diachronic change in language use. For detection of stylistic variation, we use relative entr…
Diachronic Analysis of Entities by Exploiting Wikipedia Page revisions
In the last few years, the increasing availability of large corpora spanning several time periods has opened new opportunities for the diachronic analysis of language. This type of analysis can bring to the light not onl…
Enjambment Detection in a Large Diachronic Corpus of Spanish Sonnets
Enjambment takes place when a syntactic unit is broken up across two lines of poetry, giving rise to different stylistic effects. In Spanish literary studies, there are unclear points about the types of stylistic effects…
Modelling the Diachronic Emergence of Phoneme Frequency Distributions
Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative …