What about Grammar? Using BERT Embeddings to Explore Functional-Semantic Shifts of Semi-Lexical and Grammatical Constructions

Author(s):
Fonteyn, L.
Editor(s):
Karsdorp, F.; McGillivray, B.; Nerghens, A.; Wevers, M.
Published
2020
Publication type
Article in monograph or in proceedings

Abstract

The aim of this short paper is to extend the application of embedding-based methodologies beyond

the realm of lexical semantic change. It focuses on the use of unsupervised BERT-embeddings and

uncertainty measures (Classification Entropy), and assesses whether (and how) they can be used to (semi-)automatically flag possible functional-semantic changes in the use of the construction [BE about] in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).

Distributional SemanticsCorpus LinguisticsGrammatical changeembeddingsBERT
Date issued
2020
Language
English
Is part of
Computational Humanities Research CEUR-WS (2020), Pt. 2723, p. 257-268
hdl
1887/138612
URL
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2723/short15.pdf