Diachronic-information visualization in historical dictionaries

Abstract

The field of computational linguistics has been dealing with the modeling of natural language from a computational perspective since the 1950s. However, the usage of advanced and interactive visualization techniques is very limited. This is especially the case of diachronic linguistics, which is devoted to the study of language change. This work is part of a project that aims to provide novel highly interactive visual solutions to ease the task of lexicographers, ensuring a rigorous treatment of the vocabulary beyond the use of traditional lexicographic sources and overcoming certain limitations of corpus linguistics. This article focuses on the choices made for the design and development of an interactive visual tool that supports different tasks related to the processes of drawing up and consulting historical dictionaries. Particularly, we describe solutions for the exploitation, analysis, and expert-directed validation of the data compiled in the available dictionaries in a manner that is both automatic (provided by computational methods) and intelligent (provided by the experts). We thus describe diachronlex diagrams, an interactive visual solution that facilitates linguistic work related to the understanding of the temporal evolution and the lexical relationships between the different meanings registered in subsequent editions of a dictionary.

ParHistVis: Visualization of Parallel Multilingual Historical Data

“…One strand of research has focused on the visualization of word meaning across time (Sagi et al, 2009;Rohrdantz et al, 2011;Hilpert, 2011;Tahmasebi and Risse, 2017;Jatowt et al, 2018), while others have approached the same area with stateof-the-art embeddings (see Kutuzov et al (2018) for a review). Another strand of research has concentrated on visualizing diachronic information in historical dictionaries, e.g., Theron and Fontanillo (2015) and linguistic evolution within the discourse (Lyding et al, 2012). Other work has visualized syntactic historical change (Butt et al, 2014;Schätzle et al, 2017;Schätzle, 2018).…”

Visualizing Linguistic Change as Dimension Interactions

“…Structured Parallel Coordinates (Culy et al, 2011), a specialized version of PC for the analysis of linguistic data, have been used to analyze word co-occurrences (Culy et al, 2011) and to investigate meanings of modal verbs within historical academic discourse (Lyding et al, 2012). Moreover, the diachronlex diagrams by Theron and Fontanillo (2015) which track the evolution of meanings as represented in historical dictionaries make use of PC.…”

Bridging the gap between human knowledge and machine learning

“…That said, one can say that available tools should evolve with the growth of data. Then, novel emergent techniques (Yongqing ) (Dietterich, 1997 integrating the potential of computing resources (such as data mining (Butz et al, 2009)) and the qualities of human analysis and interpretation (such as visual analytics (Kim & Lee, 2014) (Theron & Fontanillo, 2015)). The synergetic integrations of artificial and natural intelligence represent suitable approaches to discover knowledge by devising a holistic view of the problem (Timaran, 2005) (Bertini & Lalanne, 2009).…”