Categories |
NLP
DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS
COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
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About |
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DIACR-Ita is the first task on lexical semantic change for Italian, combining together computational and historical linguistics. The task challenges participants to develop systems that can automatically detect if a given word has changed its meaning over time, given contextual information from corpora. It is a well known fact that word meanings can evolve in different ways. They can undergo pejoration or amelioration (when meanings become respectively more negative or more positive) or they can be object of broadening (also referred to as generalization or extension) or narrowing (also known as restriction or specialization). For instance, the Italian word “portamento” (gait) which has underwent a narrowing of the meaning, loosing the action meaning (i.e., the act of bearing) (Grossmann & Reiner (eds), 2004). Semantic changes can be further classified based on the cognitive process they result from, i.e. either from metonymy or metaphor. Lastly, it is possible to distinguish among changes due to language-internal factors or to language-external ones (Hollmann, 2009). |
Call for Papers |
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The goal of the task is to establish if a set of words (target words) change their meaning across two periods, t1 and t2, where t1 precedes t2. Following the SemEval 2020 Task 1 setting, we rely on the comparison of two time periods. In this way we tackle two issues: 1) we reduce the number of time periods for which data has to be annotated; 2) we reduces the task complexity, allowing different model architectures to be applied to it, widening the range of possible participants. Participants will be provided with two corpora C1 and C2 (for time periods t1 and t2, respectively), and a set of target words. For each of them, systems have to decide whether a word changed or not its meaning between t1 and t2 according to the occurrences of target word(s) in sentences in C1 and C2. For instance, the meaning of the word “imbarcata” is known to have expanded (i.e, it has acquired a new sense) from t1 to t2 (originally it refers to an acrobatic manoeuvre of aeroplanes, but nowadays it is also used to refer to the state of being deeply in love with someone.) This will be reflected in different occurrences of use in sentences between C1 and C2. The task is formulated as a closed task (i.e., participants must train their models on the data that are provided). |
Credits and Sources |
| [1] DIACR-ITA 2020 : Diachronic lexical semantics in Italian @ EVALITA-2020 |
