Modeling the Evolution of English Noun Compounds with Feature-Rich Diachronic Compositionality Prediction
Filip Miletić, Sabine Schulte im Walde · 2025
We analyze the evolution of English noun compounds, which we represent as vectors of timespecific values.We implement a wide array of methods to create a rich set of features, using them to classify compounds for present-day compositionality and to assess the informativeness of the corresponding linguistic patterns.Our best results use BERT -reflecting the similarity of compounds and sentence contextsand we further capture relevant and complementary information across approaches.Leveraging these feature differences, we find that the development of low-compositional meanings is reflected by a parallel drop in compositionality and sustained semantic change.The same distinction is echoed in transformer processing: compositionality estimates require far less contextualization than semantic change estimates.