How Fast Do Distribution and Semantics of Polysemic Words Change?

Abstract

Creation of large diachronic text corpora triggered studies of evolution of natural languages using quantitative methods in the last decade. For the first time, it became possible to raise questions about general patterns of lexical semantic change. In the work by W. Hamilton et al., 2016, a hypothesis was formulated about a more rapid change in the meanings of polysemic words. In this paper, we consider how frequency of words influence variations of semantic metrics. We use explicit word vector representations and Jensen-Shannon divergence as a measure of change in the distribution and semantics of a word. The obtained results show that changes in the frequency ratio of a word in different meanings can themselves lead to a change in a word distribution, even in the absence of any changes in its meaning. Therefore, the observations made in the work by W. Hamilton et al about correlation between the rate of change of words and their local cluster coefficient in the semantic connection network (considered as a quantitative measure of polysemy) can be fully explained by the effect described in the article.