Semantic Change Characterization with LLMs using Rhetorics

Languages continually evolve in response to societal events, resulting in new terms and shifts in meanings. These changes have significant implications for computer applications, including automatic translation and chatbots, making it essential to characterize them accurately. The recent development of LLMs has notably advanced natural language understanding, particularly in sense inference and reasoning. In this paper, we investigate the potential of LLMs in characterizing three types of semantic change: dimension, relation, and orientation. We achieve this by combining LLMs' Chain-of-Thought with rhetorical devices and conducting an experimental assessment of our approach using newly created datasets. Our results highlight the effectiveness of LLMs in capturing and analyzing semantic changes, providing valuable insights to improve computational linguistic applications.

Survey in Characterization of Semantic Change

Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning of words is vital for interpreting texts coming from different cultures (regionalism or slang), domains (e.g., technical terms), or periods. In computer science, these words are relevant to computational linguistics algorithms such as translation, information retrieval, question answering, etc. Semantic changes can potentially impact the quality of the outcomes of these algorithms. Therefore, it is important to understand and characterize these changes formally. The study of this impact is a recent problem that has attracted the attention of the computational linguistics community. Several approaches propose methods to detect semantic changes with good precision, but more effort is needed to characterize how the meaning of words changes and to reason about how to reduce the impact of semantic change. This survey provides an understandable overview of existing approaches to the \textit{characterization of semantic changes} and also formally defines three classes of characterizations: if the meaning of a word becomes more general or narrow (change in dimension) if the word is used in a more pejorative or positive/ameliorated sense (change in orientation), and if there is a trend to use the word in a, for instance, metaphoric or metonymic context (change in relation). We summarized the main aspects of the selected publications in a table and discussed the needs and trends in the research activities on semantic change characterization.