Does Bert Know How ‘Virus’ Evolved: Tracking Usage Changes in Chinese Textual Data

Jing Chen (Corresponding Author), Le Qiu, Bo Peng, Chu Ren Huang

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

Recent studies indicated a trend of quantifying lexical semantic changes with distributional models. In this study, we investigated whether state-of-the-art language models can tell us the story of how a word developed its senses over time. Specifically, we exploited the Bert model to obtain sense representations and quantitatively track usage changes after performing sense classification for each occurrence of targets in a historical newspaper dataset(People’s Daily(1954–2003). Our experiment provided a positive answer to the research question, as the model has an overall precision score of 91.82% on classifying senses against human judgments. We also charted usage changes of targets, which demonstrates a possible way to (semi-)automatically observe the development of word meanings.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationChinese Lexical Semantics
Subtitle of host publication24th Workshop, CLSW 2023, Singapore, Singapore, May 19–21, 2023, Revised Selected Papers, Part II
EditorsMinghui Dong, Jia-Fei Hong, Jingxia Lin, Peng Jin
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages116-125
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9789819705863
ISBN (Print)9789819705856
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 Feb 2024
Event24th Workshop on Chinese Lexical Semantics, CLSW 2023 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 19 May 202321 May 2023

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14515 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference24th Workshop on Chinese Lexical Semantics, CLSW 2023
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period19/05/2321/05/23

Keywords

  • Sense classification
  • Sense distribution
  • Sense representations
  • Usage changes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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