Dyr Bul Shchyl. Proxying Sound Symbolism With Word Embeddings

Abstract

This paper explores modern word embeddings in the context of sound symbolism. Using basic properties of the representations space one can construct semantic axes. A method is proposed to measure if the presence of individual sounds in a given word shifts its semantics of that word along a specific axis. It is shown that, in accordance with several experimental and statistical results, word embeddings capture symbolism for certain sounds. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyr bul shchyl 1 We also want to explicitly state that we do not see any reason why other embeddings that to a certain extent support semantic arithmetic can not be used for this task.

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