Analyzing lexical emergence in Modern American English online

What it is about

The authors propose a simple method for finding newly emerging word forms in a large, time-stamped corpus. They use 8.9 billion words of geocoded American Twitter from October 2013 to November 2014 (about 980 million tweets, 397 days). They take the 67,022 word forms that occur at least 1,000 times, without lemmatisation or word-sense separation, and normalise each form's daily frequency per billion words. A form counts as emerging when its frequency at the start of the period is low and its Spearman correlation with time is high. The method finds 29 emerging forms of different parts of speech and word-formation types, for example the adjective "baeless", built from "bae". The authors say the set is small because the corpus is still small, and that the cut-offs were chosen conservatively.

Ideas

• I1. en/src/lexgen.rs: implement the emergence test as a deterministic Rust step over any dated corpus that Mova can use (for example dated public-domain books in tools/gutenberg): frequency floor, daily or yearly bins, and a rank correlation with time. Measure whether it finds the known shifts in a list of about 20 words with known dates, and run it twice to confirm the output is identical.
• I2. Keep forms unlemmatised in the lexicon checks: run en morph-eval on forms that the lemmatiser merges (computer and computers, alternative spellings), and report how many of them would be lost if they were merged. This is a test of en/src/morph.rs, not a change to it.
• I3. Affix check for emerging forms: take the 29 forms and test whether the derivation rules in en (for example -less and -ness) analyse them. The count of forms with a clean affix analysis tells whether the derivation chapters cover new words.

For Mova

The touch points are en/src/lexgen.rs and en/src/morph.rs (lemma and form handling), with tools/gutenberg as a dated source. The chapters are 17. Derivation II: suffixes and 18. Compounding, conversion and the minor processes. The Twitter corpus is not open and is used only as a description of the method; the 29 forms are for tests. Measure first the emergence test on the dated public-domain books against the known shifts.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1017/s1360674316000113

@inproceedings{grieve2016analyzing,
  title = {{Analyzing lexical emergence in Modern American English online}},
  author = {Grieve, Jack and Nini, Andrea and Guo, Diansheng},
  booktitle = {English Language and Linguistics 21(1): 99–127 (online 2016)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.1017/s1360674316000113},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674316000113}
}

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