Distributional Analysis of Function Words

This paper is a first attempt at reconciling the current methods of distributional semantics with the function word emphasis of formal linguistics. We consider a multiply polysemous function word, the German reflexive pronoun "sich", and investigate in which ways natural subclasses of this word known from the theoretical and typological literature map onto recent models from distributional semantics.

German in Flux: Detecting Metaphoric Change via Word Entropy

This paper explores the information-theoretic measure entropy to detect metaphoric change, transferring ideas from hypernym detection to research on language change. We also build the first diachronic test set for German as a standard for metaphoric change annotation. Our model shows high performance, is unsupervised, language-independent and generalizable to other processes of semantic change.