Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying causes. Here we show how two different distributional measures can be used to detect two different types of semantic change. The first measure, which has been used in many previous works, analyzes global shifts in a word’s distributional semantics; it is sensitive to changes due to regular processes of linguistic drift, such as the semantic generalization of promise (“I promise.” “It promised to be exciting.”). The second measure, which we develop here, focuses on local changes to a word’s nearest semantic neighbors; it is more sensitive to cultural shifts, such as the change in the meaning of cell (“prison cell” “cell phone”). Comparing measurements made by these two methods allows researchers to determine whether changes are more cultural or linguistic in nature, a distinction that is essential for work in the digital humanities and historical linguistics.
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机译：词的含义发生变化的原因有很多，包括新技术等文化因素和主观化等常规语言过程。要了解语言和文化的发展，就需要弄清这些根本原因。在这里，我们展示了如何使用两种不同的分布度量来检测两种不同类型的语义变化。第一种方法已在以前的许多著作中使用，它分析了单词分布语义的整体变化。它对由于规则的语言漂变过程而引起的变化非常敏感，例如promise的语义概括（“ I promise”。“ promise be令人激动。”）。我们在这里开发的第二种方法集中于对单词最近的语义邻居的局部更改；它对文化转变（例如手机含义的改变）（“监狱手机”“手机”）更敏感。比较这两种方法的测量结果，研究人员可以确定变化本质上是文化上的还是语言上的，这是数字人文科学和历史语言学研究中必不可少的区别。
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