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LREC
2010

Automatically Identifying Changes in the Semantic Orientation of Words

14 years 27 days ago
Automatically Identifying Changes in the Semantic Orientation of Words
The meanings of words are not fixed but in fact undergo change, with new word senses arising and established senses taking on new aspects of meaning or falling out of usage. Two types of semantic change are amelioration and pejoration; in these processes a word sense changes to become more positive or negative, respectively. In this first computational study of amelioration and pejoration we adapt a web-based method for determining semantic orientation to the task of identifying ameliorations and pejorations in corpora from differing time periods. We evaluate our proposed method on a small dataset of known historical ameliorations and pejorations, and find it to perform better than a random baseline. Since this test dataset is small, we conduct a further evaluation on artificial examples of amelioration and pejoration, and again find evidence that our proposed method is able to identify changes in semantic orientation. Finally, we conduct a preliminary evaluation in which we apply our...
Paul Cook, Suzanne Stevenson
Added 29 Oct 2010
Updated 29 Oct 2010
Type Conference
Year 2010
Where LREC
Authors Paul Cook, Suzanne Stevenson
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