@inproceedings{yu-2023-systematic,
title = "Systematic word meta-sense extension",
author = "Yu, Lei",
editor = "Bouamor, Houda and
Pino, Juan and
Bali, Kalika",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = dec,
year = "2023",
address = "Singapore",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.675/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.675",
pages = "10953--10966",
abstract = "The meaning of polysemous words often varies in a highly productive yet predictable way. Generalizing the regularity between conventional senses to derive novel word meaning is crucial for automated processing of non-literal language uses such as figurative expressions. We introduce a novel task called systematic word meta-sense extension (SWORME) to test and improve language models' ability to extend word meaning to denote new semantic domains (also called meta-senses) that bear regular semantic relations with existing senses. We found that language models prefer incremental lexical semantic change toward conceptually similar meta-senses such as logical metonymy, and are much worse at predicting highly non-literal meaning extensions such as metaphors. We propose a novel analogy-based method of word meaning extension, and show that it effectively improves language model systematicity in making both gradual and radical types of meta-sense extension. We further demonstrate that learning systematic meta-sense extensions benefits language models on multiple benchmarks of figurative language understanding."
}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="yu-2023-systematic">
<titleInfo>
<title>Systematic word meta-sense extension</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Lei</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Yu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2023-12</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Houda</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bouamor</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Juan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Pino</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Kalika</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bali</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Singapore</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>The meaning of polysemous words often varies in a highly productive yet predictable way. Generalizing the regularity between conventional senses to derive novel word meaning is crucial for automated processing of non-literal language uses such as figurative expressions. We introduce a novel task called systematic word meta-sense extension (SWORME) to test and improve language models’ ability to extend word meaning to denote new semantic domains (also called meta-senses) that bear regular semantic relations with existing senses. We found that language models prefer incremental lexical semantic change toward conceptually similar meta-senses such as logical metonymy, and are much worse at predicting highly non-literal meaning extensions such as metaphors. We propose a novel analogy-based method of word meaning extension, and show that it effectively improves language model systematicity in making both gradual and radical types of meta-sense extension. We further demonstrate that learning systematic meta-sense extensions benefits language models on multiple benchmarks of figurative language understanding.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">yu-2023-systematic</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.675</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.675/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2023-12</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>10953</start>
<end>10966</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Systematic word meta-sense extension
%A Yu, Lei
%Y Bouamor, Houda
%Y Pino, Juan
%Y Bali, Kalika
%S Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2023
%8 December
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Singapore
%F yu-2023-systematic
%X The meaning of polysemous words often varies in a highly productive yet predictable way. Generalizing the regularity between conventional senses to derive novel word meaning is crucial for automated processing of non-literal language uses such as figurative expressions. We introduce a novel task called systematic word meta-sense extension (SWORME) to test and improve language models’ ability to extend word meaning to denote new semantic domains (also called meta-senses) that bear regular semantic relations with existing senses. We found that language models prefer incremental lexical semantic change toward conceptually similar meta-senses such as logical metonymy, and are much worse at predicting highly non-literal meaning extensions such as metaphors. We propose a novel analogy-based method of word meaning extension, and show that it effectively improves language model systematicity in making both gradual and radical types of meta-sense extension. We further demonstrate that learning systematic meta-sense extensions benefits language models on multiple benchmarks of figurative language understanding.
%R 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.675
%U https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.675/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.675
%P 10953-10966
Markdown (Informal)
[Systematic word meta-sense extension](https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.675/) (Yu, EMNLP 2023)
ACL
- Lei Yu. 2023. Systematic word meta-sense extension. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10953–10966, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.