07.03.23 - Lonneke van der Plas

Societies are changing continuously and innovations around us call for the emergence of new terms to refer to these new elements. Vice versa, language can serve as a vehicle for creative thought. In this talk, I will discuss language change from a lexical point of view. More in particular, I will discuss several facets of lexical innovation and how to model these using computational models.

Among the many types of lexical innovation, compounding is a very flexible and efficient manner to create new concepts. The relationship between the components of a compound can often be left underspecified and need to be determined by means of contextual information and world knowledge in a communication setting. I will discuss some of our work on the interpretation of compounds (both from unimodal and multimodal perspective) by means of computational models, and will then focus on some recent additions to our work on the automatic prediction of new compounds. I will end the presentation with a study on the variation of the level of compositionality in compounds as they mature over time, again by means of computational modelling.