Modeling the Evolution of English Noun Compounds with Feature-Rich Diachronic Compositionality Prediction

Filip Miletić, Sabine Walde

Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 20071–20092, 2025.

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Abstract

We analyze the evolution of English noun compounds, which we represent as vectors of time-specific values. We implement a wide array of methods to create a rich set of features, using them to classify compounds for present-day compositionality and to assess the informativeness of the corresponding linguistic patterns. Our best results use BERT – reflecting the similarity of compounds and sentence contexts – and we further capture relevant and complementary information across approaches. Leveraging these feature differences, we find that the development of low-compositional meanings is reflected by a parallel drop in compositionality and sustained semantic change. The same distinction is echoed in transformer processing: compositionality estimates require far less contextualization than semantic change estimates.

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