{"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/systematic-word-meta-sense-extension","title":"Systematic word meta-sense extension","arxiv_id":"2311.13029","date":"2023-11-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lei Yu"],"abstract":"The meaning of polysemous words often varies in a highly productive yet predictable way. Generalizing the regularity between conventional senses to derive novel word meaning is crucial for automated processing of non-literal language uses such as figurative expressions. We introduce a novel task called systematic word meta-sense extension (SWORME) to test and improve language models' ability to extend word meaning to denote new semantic domains (also called meta-senses) that bear regular semantic relations with existing senses. We found that language models prefer incremental lexical semantic change toward conceptually similar meta-senses such as logical metonymy, and are much worse at predicting highly non-literal meaning extensions such as metaphors. We propose a novel analogy-based method of word meaning extension, and show that it effectively improves language model systematicity in making both gradual and radical types of meta-sense extension. We further demonstrate that learning systematic meta-sense extensions benefits language models on multiple benchmarks of figurative language understanding.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13029v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.13029v1.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":"systematic-word-meta-sense-extension","repo_url":"https://github.com/jadeleiyu/sworme","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2311.13029","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2311.13029","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}