Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Bill Thompson (joint work with Sean Roberts and Gary Lupyan)

Title: How Translatable are Common Words? Some Answers from Distributional Semantics

Abstract: We analysed the semantic networks of 1,016 concepts in 41 languages using distributional models of lexical semantics. We examined which semantic domains (e.g. animals, emotions, body parts and numbers) show the most and least alignment between different languages, and whether alignment is greater for more concrete terms (it is not). We examined how alignment varies for different parts of speech, and how it relates to human judgements of similarity and to lexical factors such as frequency and neighborhood density. Our analyses show that the alignment between one language and another is statistically related to the cultural and historical relatedness of the languages, offering large-scale statistical evidence for the view that natural language lexical semantics are influenced by processes of cultural evolution.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Henry Conklin

Centre for Language Evolution