Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
doi:10.22028/D291-37928
Title: | Using relative entropy for detection and analysis of periods of diachronic linguistic change |
Author(s): | Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania Teich, Elke |
Language: | English |
Title: | Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature |
Pages: | 22--33 |
Publisher/Platform: | Association for Computational Linguistics |
Year of Publication: | 2018 |
Place of publication: | Santa Fe, New Mexico |
Place of the conference: | Santa Fe, New Mexico |
DDC notations: | 400 Language, linguistics |
Publikation type: | Conference Paper |
Abstract: | 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. |
URL of the first publication: | https://aclanthology.org/W18-4503 |
Link to this record: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:291--ds-379281 hdl:20.500.11880/34316 http://dx.doi.org/10.22028/D291-37928 |
ISBN: | 978-1-948087-61-2 |
Date of registration: | 11-Nov-2022 |
Third-party funds sponsorship: | This research is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) under grants SFB1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de) and EXC 284: Multimodal Computing and Interaction (www.mmci.uni-saarland.de). |
Faculty: | P - Philosophische Fakultät |
Department: | P - Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie |
Professorship: | P - Prof. Dr. Elke Teich |
Collections: | SciDok - Der Wissenschaftsserver der Universität des Saarlandes |
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W18-4503.pdf | 584,3 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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