A Corpus-based Approach to the Quantitative Criterion for the Lexicographic Listing of Neologisms

This study answers whether there is a consistent quantitative criterion for the lexicographic listing of neologisms in English and Chinese. The quantitative patterns of neologisms to lexicographic listings are analyzed by using a comparative diachronic corpus-based approach to their pre-listing frequency patterns and the latencies between their initial occurrences in the WebCorp and the BCC Corpus and their final listings in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary. It is found that Chinese and English neologisms display similar patterns of frequencies and latencies, based on which an implicit listing criterion is revealed. Keywords: quantitative criteria, lexicographic listing, neologism, corpus-base

Automatic identification of words with novel but infrequent senses

Abstract. We propose a statistical method for identifying words that have a novel sense in one corpus compared to another based on differences in their lexico-syntactic contexts in those corpora. In contrast to previous work on identifying semantic change, we focus specifically on infrequent word senses. Given the challenges of evaluation for this task, we further propose a novel evaluation method based on synthetic examples of semantic change that allows us to simulate differing degrees of sense change. Our proposed method is able to identify rather subtle simulated sense changes, and outperforms both a random baseline and a previously-proposed approach