{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/slangvolution-a-causal-analysis-of-semantic-1","title":"Slangvolution: A Causal Analysis of Semantic Change and Frequency Dynamics in Slang","arxiv_id":"2203.04651","date":"2022-03-09","proceeding":"ACL 2022 5","authors":["Daphna Keidar","Andreas Opedal","Zhijing Jin","Mrinmaya Sachan"],"abstract":"Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various distributional factors associate with language change, but how they causally affect it. In particular, we study slang, which is an informal language that is typically restricted to a specific group or social setting. We analyze the semantic change and frequency shift of slang words and compare them to those of standard, nonslang words. With causal discovery and causal inference techniques, we measure the effect that word type (slang/nonslang) has on both semantic change and frequency shift, as well as its relationship to frequency, polysemy and part of speech. Our analysis provides some new insights in the study of language change, e.g., we show that slang words undergo less semantic change but tend to have larger frequency shifts over time.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04651v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.04651v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"slangvolution-a-causal-analysis-of-semantic-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/andreasopedal/slangvolution","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"causal-discovery","task_name":"Causal Discovery"},{"task_slug":"causal-inference","task_name":"Causal Inference"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2203.04651","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2203.04651","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}