DiaHClust: an Iterative Hierarchical Clustering Approach for Identifying Stages in Language Change

Abstract

Language change is often assessed against a set of predetermined time periods in order to be able to trace its diachronic trajectory. This is problematic, since a predetermined periodization might obscure significant developments and lead to false assumptions about the data. Moreover, these time periods can be based on factors which are either arbitrary or non-linguistic, e.g., dividing the corpus data into equidistant stages or taking into account language-external events. Addressing this problem, in this paper we present a data-driven approach to periodization: 'DiaHClust'. Di-aHClust is based on iterative hierarchical clustering and offers a multi-layered perspective on change from text-level to broader time periods. We demonstrate the usefulness of Di-aHClust via a case study investigating syntactic change in Icelandic, modelling the syntactic system of the language in terms of vectors of syntactic change.

Chinese Personal Name Disambiguation Based on Clustering

“…Agglomerative hierarchical clustering belongs to a bottom-up method [12]. It treats each document containing target personal name as a separate cluster in the beginning.…”

Visual analytics for historical linguistics: opportunities and challenges

“…Since multiple feature interactions have to be taken into account in the diachronic analysis of a single phenomenon, a multitude of high-dimensional data tables with different characteristics are usually generated. A prototypical historical linguistic data table is given in Table 1, with diachronic data extracted from IcePaHC showing the interaction between subject case marking (here NOM(INATIVE) vs. DAT(IVE)) and voice (active, passive, middle) across the Icelandic diachrony (see also Schätzle [2018] for similar and more detailed data).…”

“…Once HistoBankVis was developed, we began to work with this system and found that the dimension interaction in combination with the overall flexibility of the system indeed facilitated our diachronic investigations immensely. More than once, we were able to identify correlations we had not been able to otherwise anticipate given the current state of the art [see Schätzle, 2018]. We illustrate the general way of working with HistoBankVis in this section via a concrete case study which examines the interrelation between subject case and word order in Icelandic (see also , Schätzle [2018], ).…”

“…More than once, we were able to identify correlations we had not been able to otherwise anticipate given the current state of the art [see Schätzle, 2018]. We illustrate the general way of working with HistoBankVis in this section via a concrete case study which examines the interrelation between subject case and word order in Icelandic (see also , Schätzle [2018], ).…”

“…This change is driven by an increased use of middle verbs, which are mainly experiencer predicates, together with a dative subject. The middle verbs in question mainly appear to have been subject to being lexicalized as experiencer verbs, as part of which the formerly locative oblique argu- ment becomes reanalyzed as an experiencer subject [Schätzle, 2018]. This historical change at the lexical level interconnected with the change in syntactic alignment immediately explains the slower tendency for dative subjects to occur in the prefinite position: Only once the dative experiencers are tightly coupled with the subject role and the SVO order has been more firmly established, can the dative subjects conform to the overall word order settings.…”