# Where New Words Are Born: Distributional Semantic Analysis of Neologisms and Their Semantic Neighborhoods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.07740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07740/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

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## Abstract (arXiv)

We perform statistical analysis of the phenomenon of neology, the process by which new words emerge in a language, using large diachronic corpora of English. We investigate the importance of two factors, semantic sparsity and frequency growth rates of semantic neighbors, formalized in the distributional semantics paradigm. We show that both factors are predictive of word emergence although we find more support for the latter hypothesis. Besides presenting a new linguistic application of distributional semantics, this study tackles the linguistic question of the role of language-internal factors (in our case, sparsity) in language change motivated by language-external factors (reflected in frequency growth).