词汇语义变化与社会变迁定量观测与分析
Lexical Semantic Variation and Social Change: Quantitative Observation and Analysis
随着社会的发展和科技的进步,人们交流的内容与方式发生着翻天覆地的变化,交流所使用的词汇和语义也发生了显著变化。在过去的研究中,研究者主要通过词汇的使用频度变化来观测和分析词汇语义的变迁,取得了很多重要发现。但是这些词频统计方法无法考虑词汇的语义内涵。为了更精确地捕获词汇语义变化及其反映的社会变迁,我们利用分布式词表示方法,提出将词汇的多个词义用不同的低维向量表示。利用该方法,研究者可以根据词义使用频度的变化情况,定量观测与分析词义变化与社会变迁。这将为语言演化、社会语言学乃至语言规划研究提供重要量化工具。
With social and technological developments, the contents and means of human communication have undergone tremendous changes, which, in turn, lead to the evolution of word forms and their meanings in human language. In literature, much scholarship has been devoted to the semantic dynamics of words from the perspective of usage frequency, yet this frequency-based method cannot explain clearly the lexical-semantic change due to its failure to cover word senses. In this paper, a large-scale Chinese newspaper text corpus is employed and the distributed representations of some words and their senses are elicited in order to observe the diachronic evolvement of word semantics. The semantic change of the words in the timeline suggests that the distributional method proposed in this paper is effective for the exploration of lexical semantic dynamics. The implication of this study is that the corpus-based distributional method can become a useful tool for studies in other fi elds, such as language evolution, sociolinguistics and language planning.
词汇语义 / 社会变迁 / 时序信息 / 分布式表示 / 词向量
lexical semantics / social change / temporal information / distributed representation / word representation
/
| 〈 |
|
〉 |