Tracing Semantic Variation in Slang (2022)

Abstract: The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation is driven by culture-dependent communicative needs. An alternative view focuses on slang’s social functions suggesting that the desire to foster semantic distinction may have led to the historical emergence of community-specific slang senses. We explore these theories using computational models and test them against historical slang dictionary entries, with a focus on characterizing regularity in the geographical variation of slang usages attested in the US and the UK over the past two centuries. We show that our models are able to predict the regional identity of emerging slang word meanings from historical slang records. We offer empirical evidence that both communicative need and semantic distinction play a role in the variation of slang meaning yet their relative importance fluctuates over the course of history. Our work offers an opportunity for incorporating historical cultural elements into the natural language processing of slang.

## introduction slang is a type of informal language commonly used in both day-to-day conversations and online written text. the pervasiveness of slang has generated increasing interest in the natural language processing (nlp) community, with systems proposed for automatic detection @xcite , generation @xcite , and interpretation @xcite of slang. however, these existing approaches do not account for the semantic variation of slang among different groups of users-a defining characteristic of slang which distinguishes it from conventional language @xcite @xcite . ## theoretical hypotheses we consider two theoretical hypotheses for characterizing regularity in slang semantic variation: communicative need and semantic distinction. communicative need. prior work has suggested that slang may be driven by culturedependent communicative need @xcite . we refer to communicative need as how frequently a meaning needs to be communicated or expressed. following recent work (e.g., @xcite , we estimate communicative need based on usage frequencies from google ngram foot_0 over the past two centuries. 2 in the context of slang semantic variation, certain things might be more frequently talked about in one region (or country) over another. as such, we might expect these differential needs to drive meaning differentiation in slang terms. for example, a usspecific slang sense for beast describes the subway line #2 of the new york city transit network, most likely due to the specific need for communicating that information in the us (as opposed to the uk). ## conclusion we have presented a principled and large-scale computational analysis of slang semantic variation over history. inspired by the theoretical hypotheses of communicative need and semantic distinction, we develop a computational approach to test these theories against regional slang attested in the uk and the us over a stretched period of time. we find regular patterns in slang semantic variation that are predictive of regional identities of the emerging slang senses. while both hypotheses are found to be relevant for predicting slang semantic variation, we observe that semantic distinction better explains the semantic variation in slang terms used in the us and the uk over the past two centuries. our work sheds light on the basic principles of slang semantic variation and provides opportunities for incorporating historical cultural elements in the automated processing of informal language such as slang generation and interpretation.