Annotating Word Meanings over Time: The Trade-off between Scalability, Reliability and Expressivity Power

Abstract

Annotating the meanings of a word over time in order to document their emergence or disappearance presents substantial implementation challenges. These difficulties arise for several reasons, notably the need for sufficient expressive power in the annotation paradigm to capture unconventional or rare meanings, as well as issues of scalability related to the number of annotations required. The first challenge is particularly acute in the context of historical texts, where modern annotators must interpret word meanings in sources that are temporally distant and often absent from contemporary dictionaries and language use. The second challenge is inherent to the distribution of word meanings, which tend to occur sparsely and intermittently over long time spans. In this paper, we examine several annotation paradigms, discussing their respective advantages and limitations. We also present a pilot study on English and Swedish. Our results indicate that a usage-sense inventory based annotation paradigm can be adopted in place of a usage-pairs-based approach while maintaining expressivity power and reducing the complexity from quadratic to linear.

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