This paper explores the information-theoretic measure entropy to detect metaphoric change, transferring ideas from hypernym detection to research on language change. We also build the first diachronic test set for German as a standard for metaphoric change annotation. Our model shows high performance, is unsupervised, language-independent and generalizable to other processes of semantic change.
We present the context-theoretic framework, which provides a set of rules for the nature of composition of meaning based on the philosophy of meaning as context. Principally, in the framework the composition of the meaning of words can be represented as multiplication of their representative vectors, where multiplication is distributive with respect to the vector space. We discuss the applicability of the framework to a range of techniques in natural language processing, including subsequence matching, the lexical entailment model of (2005), vector-based representations of taxonomies, statistical parsing and the representation of uncertainty in logical semantics. This paper presents a new statistical method for detecting and tracking changes in word meaning, based on Latent Semantic Analysis. By comparing the density of semantic vector clusters this method allows researchers to make statistical inferences on questions such as whether the meaning of a word changed across time or if a phonetic cluster is associated with a specific meaning. Possible applications of this method are then illustrated in tracing the semantic change of 'dog', 'do', and 'deer' in early English and examining and comparing phonaesthemes. 1. Introduction 2. An Outline of Grammatical Evolution 3. Some Cognitive Abilities of Animals 4. On Pidgins and Other Restricted Linguistic Systems 5. Clause Subordination 6. On The Rise of Recursion 7. Early Language References Subject Index   We show that it is possible to reliably discriminate whether a syntactic construction is meant literally or metaphorically using lexical semantic features of the words that participate in the construction. Our model is constructed using English resources, and we obtain state-of-the-art performance relative to previous work in this language. Using a model transfer approach by pivoting through a bilingual dictionary, we show our model can identify metaphoric expressions in other languages. We provide results on three new test sets in Spanish, Farsi, and Russian. The results support the hypothesis that metaphors are conceptual, rather than lexical, in nature.