Automatically Identifying Changes in the Semantic Orientation of Words

Paul Cook, Suzanne Stevenson


Abstract
The meanings of words are not fixed but in fact undergo change, with new word senses arising and established senses taking on new aspects of meaning or falling out of usage. Two types of semantic change are amelioration and pejoration; in these processes a word sense changes to become more positive or negative, respectively. In this first computational study of amelioration and pejoration we adapt a web-based method for determining semantic orientation to the task of identifying ameliorations and pejorations in corpora from differing time periods. We evaluate our proposed method on a small dataset of known historical ameliorations and pejorations, and find it to perform better than a random baseline. Since this test dataset is small, we conduct a further evaluation on artificial examples of amelioration and pejoration, and again find evidence that our proposed method is able to identify changes in semantic orientation. Finally, we conduct a preliminary evaluation in which we apply our methods to the task of finding words which have recently undergone amelioration or pejoration.
Anthology ID:
L10-1448
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/657_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paul Cook and Suzanne Stevenson. 2010. Automatically Identifying Changes in the Semantic Orientation of Words. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Automatically Identifying Changes in the Semantic Orientation of Words (Cook & Stevenson, LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/657_Paper.pdf