2023/11/21 by Lei Yu, Yu, Lei
Computer Science · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.13029
openalex publication_date 2023/11/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The meaning of polysemous words often varies in a highly productive yet predictable way. Generalizing the regularity between conventional senses to derive novel word meaning is crucial for automated processing of non-literal language uses such as figurative expressions. We introduce a novel task called systematic word meta-sense extension (SWORME) to test and improve language models' ability to extend word meaning to denote new semantic domains (also called meta-senses) that bear regular semantic relations with existing senses. We found that language models prefer incremental lexical semantic change toward conceptually similar meta-senses such as logical metonymy, and are much worse at predicting highly non-literal meaning extensions such as metaphors. We propose a novel analogy-based method of word meaning extension, and show that it effectively improves language model systematicity in making both gradual and radical types of meta-sense extension. We further demonstrate that learning systematic meta-sense extensions benefits language models on multiple benchmarks of figurative language understanding.