Cultural Shift or Linguistic Drift? Comparing Two Computational Measures of Semantic Change

TL;DR

This paper compares two distributional measures to distinguish between cultural and linguistic semantic changes in language evolution, aiding digital humanities and historical linguistics research.

Contribution

It introduces a new local measure of semantic change and compares it with an existing global measure to identify different types of semantic shifts.

Findings

Global measure detects linguistic drift in semantics.

Local measure captures cultural shifts in meaning.

Comparison helps differentiate causes of semantic change.

Abstract

Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying causes. Here we show how two different distributional measures can be used to detect two different types of semantic change. The first measure, which has been used in many previous works, analyzes global shifts in a word's distributional semantics, it is sensitive to changes due to regular processes of linguistic drift, such as the semantic generalization of promise ("I promise." -> "It promised to be exciting."). The second measure, which we develop here, focuses on local changes to a word's nearest semantic neighbors; it is more sensitive to cultural shifts, such as the change in the meaning of cell ("prison cell" -> "cell phone"). Comparing measurements made by these two methods allows researchers to determine whether changes are more cultural or linguistic in nature, a distinction that is essential for work in the digital humanities and historical linguistics.