{"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":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26964/galley/16600/download/"}]}