Distributional Analysis of Verbal Neologisms: Task Definition and Dataset Construction
Authors: Matteo Amore, Stephen McGregor, Elisabetta Jezek (Università di Pavia, CELI Language Technology, CNRS, Université Sorbonne nouvelle Paris 3, 2018)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
In this paper we introduce the task English In this paper we introduce the task of interpreting verbal neologism (VNeo) for the Italian language making use of a highly context-sensitive distributional semantic model (DSM). The task is commonly performed manually by lexicographers verifying the contexts in which the VNeo appear. Developing such a task is likely to be of use from a cognitive, social and linguistic perspective. In the following, we first outline the motivation for our study and our goal, then focus on the construction of the dataset and the definition of the task.

Introduction
Studying neologisms can tell us several things. From a lexicographic point of view, neologisms can show trends that a language is following. In our opinion, they can also shed light on various aspects related to linguistic creativity; when speakers use new words (coined by themselves, or recently coined by someone else), they expect that the hearer can understand what they have just said.1 Reversing the perspective, from the point of view of the hearers, when they encounter a word for the first time, they are generally capable of making hypotheses about the meaning of that word. The process of understanding unknown words involves the employment of previously acquired information. This knowledge can come from various sources: experience of the world, education, and contextual elements;2 in this contribution we focus on linguistic contextual (namely cooccurrence) information. For computational linguistics, neologisms raise some intriguing issues: automatic detection (especially for languages which do not separate written words with blank spaces); lemmatisation; POS tagging; semantic analysis; and so forth. In this paper we present the task we have developed in order to interpret neologisms, using a context-sensitive DSM described by McGregor et al. (McGregor et al., 2015). This model was built to represent concepts in a spatial configuration, making use of a computational technique that creates conceptual subspaces. With the help of this DSM we intend to analyse the behaviour of a sub-group of neologisms, namely verbal neologisms (see Amore 2017 for more background). Our goal is primarily linguistic. We intend to investigate the interpretation of VNeo, measuring the semantic salience of candidate synonyms by way of geometries indicated by an analysis of cooccurrence observations of VNeos. For instance, we expect that the VNeo googlare ‘to google’ and a verb like cercare ‘to search’ are geometrically related in a subspace specific to the conceptual context of the neologism.

Conclusion
The aim of the task presented here is to investigate the importance of linguistic context for the interpretation of neologisms, grounding the analysis in a context-sensitive DSM. With this task we intend to tackle issues connected with creativity processes and the environmental (contextual) sensibility typical of human cognition. In addition, we apply, for the first time, this DSM to Italian, providing a new semantic resource for the analysis of the language. Further studies may compare our results with other DSMs, and/or study what the semantic relations found with this specific approach reveal about other phenomena belonging to different linguistic levels (e.g. syntax).