When disyllabic words of Chinese are compounded, truncation often applies to yield a disyllabic output that draws one syllable from each of the contributing words, e.g., xiàdiē + fúdù → xiàdiē + fúdù → diēfú. A substantial portion of new words enter Chinese via this process, and all combinations of four underlying syllables are attested in disyllabic neologisms. Variation in which syllable of t...

Based on the theories of social representation (SC) and Central Core (CC), a structural study was undertaken regarding the neologism hanseniase (Hansen's disease), the term adopted by Brazil's Ministry of Health in the 1970s. Carried out during 2001, this study interviewed eight hundred housewives residing in the Rio de Janeiro and Duque de Caxias municipalities. It found that Hansen's disease ...

The continuous emergence of new technical terms and the difficulty of keeping up with neologism in parallel corpora deteriorate the performance of statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. This paper explores the use of morphological information to improve English-to-Chinese translation for technical terms. To reduce the morphemelevel translation ambiguity, we group the morphemes into morp...

We present measurements and analysis of censorship on Weibo, a popular microblogging site in China. Since we were limited in the rate at which we could download posts, we identified users likely to participate in sensitive topics and recursively followed their social contacts. We also leveraged new natural language processing techniques to pick out trending topics despite the use of neologisms,...

Most new words, or neologisms, bubble beneath the surface of widespread usage for some time, perhaps even years, before gaining acceptance in conventional print dictionaries [1]. A shorter, yet still significant, delay is also evident in the life-cycle of NLP-oriented lexical resources like WordNet [2]. A more topical lexical resource is Wikipedia [3], an open-source community-maintained encycl...

Gender-based research on the language use in blogs has its roots in the long-standing notion that men and women speak and write differently. This paper reports an empirical study on the use of English in a blog context involving Malaysian blog authors. Specifically, the study aimed to identify gender-specific English use among Malaysian blog authors and determine the differences in the language...

This paper focuses on some observed similarities between band names, album titles, and song titles within the shoegazing subgenre of rock music, which is characterized by loud, swirling layers of distorted guitar and droning noise. The onomastic similarities are analyzed in terms of phonesthemes (Firth 1930), which are submorphemic sound/meaning pairs, wherein a particular phone or cluster of p...

This paper presents a semi-supervised learning framework for mining Chinese-English lexicons from large amount of Chinese Web pages. The issue is motivated by the observation that many Chinese neologisms are accompanied by their English translations in the form of parenthesis. We classify parenthetical translations into bilingual abbreviations, transliterations, and translations. A frequency-ba...

We describe two experiments related to learning new words in context. We study two types of new words: metaphors (for whom a related meaning already exists) and artiicial words. The new words were used anaphorically to refer to past objects in the text. For anaphoric metaphors, subjects showed an initial bias to adopt a literal interpretation, which shifted as the experiment progressed. Subject...