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{
    "pk": 26964,
    "title": "Mental Algorithms in the Historical Emergence of Word Meanings",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Words frequently acquire new senses, but the mental processthat underlies the historical emergence of these senses is oftenopaque. Many have suggested that word meanings develop innon-arbitrary ways, but no attempt has been made to formalizethese proposals and test them against historical data at scale.We propose that word meaning extension should reflect a drivetowards cognitive economy. We test this proposal by exploringa family of computational models that predict the evolution ofword senses, evaluated against a large digitized lexicon thatdates back 1000 years in English language history. Our find-ings suggest that word meanings not only extend in predictableways, but also that they do so following an historical path thattends to minimize cognitive cost - through a process of nearest-neighbor chaining. Our work contributes a formal approach toreverse-engineering mental algorithms of the human lexicon.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Word meaning; semantic change; polysemy;chaining; nearest neighbor algorithm; lexicon"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Talks: Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7b17m6m6",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Christian",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Ramiro",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Barbara",
            "middle_name": "C.",
            "last_name": "Malt",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Lehigh University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Mahesh",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Srinivasan",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Yang",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Xu",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2017-01-01T10:00:00-08:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26964/galley/16600/download/"
        }
    ]
}