Jader Martins Camboim De Sa
Doctoral researcher at the LIST
Jader works on the project ‘SEMANTIC CHANGE IN COMPUTATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MEANING‘ under the supervision of Cedric Pruski
Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change in human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or semantic changes of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning of words is vital for interpreting texts from different cultures (regionalism or slang), domains (e.g., technical terms), or periods. In computer science, these words are relevant to Natural Language Processing systems such as translation, information retrieval, question answering, etc. Semantic changes can impact the quality of the outcomes of these algorithms. Therefore, it is essential to understand and characterise these changes formally. The study of this impact is a recent problem that has attracted the attention of the computational linguistics community, which still needs a deeper understanding of the types of change. In my thesis, I formally define three classes of characterisations: They are (1) If the meaning of a word becomes more general or narrow (change in dimension). (2) If the word is used in a more pejorative or positive/ameliorated sense (change in orientation), and (3) if there is a trend to use the word in a, for instance, metaphoric or metonymic context (change in relation). Finally, I analyse how these categories of changes impact information systems.