Polysemous Words Research Articles

Semantic differences in understanding of English words of senior high school students: frequent questions and teaching suggestions

This research demonstrates the English words’ understanding due to semantic differences, together with further teaching advice and frequent questions. Because of the cultural differences, the expression of English and Chinese meanings is different. Consequently, it can be easy for learners to confuse and understand the intended meaning incorrectly. There are several negative results of students having weak knowledge of polysemous words: lower academic performance, and passage understanding, together with a weaker lexical foundation. In order to explore thus address the situation of mastered weak polysemy knowledge, this essay will investigate students and teachers who come from high schools in various cities in China their knowledge of polysemy as well as the following learning difficulties; the research found that (1) the universality of polysemy learning, academic performance; (2) the teaching pertinence, importance of foundation and teaching method. From those findings, this research supposes that the approach of increasing reading amount, fostering English literacy, and using a preferred vocabulary memorization method can be used so as to improve and solve the issue.

4th Year EFL Iraqi Leaners' Pragmatic Failure in Polysemy

This paper is an endeavor to identify the failure of EFL Iraqi learners when they are asked to realize the meaning of polysemous words in their context. The model of analysis is Thomas's (1983) "pragmatic failure"(PF). Polysemous words have different meanings. There are two kinds of polysemy: semantic and pragmatic polysemy. The important part of the study at hand is pragmatic polysemy, which is the pragmatic meaning that results from polysemous words through the intentionality of the speakers, as these words leave a free space for their speakers to pick the meaning they want to communicate. Besides, these meanings may mingle on the part of the listeners in native language speakers and listeners, so polysemous words would, of course, constitute a problem for the learners of English. Again, it is believed that the lack of both linguistic and pragmatic competence is the result of this pragmatic failure.

Various Problems And Solutions In Translating Between Arabic And Indonesian

This research examines the challenges and strategies involved in translating Arabic texts, particularly Quranic verses, into Indonesian. Given the significant linguistic and cultural differences between Arabic and Indonesian, translation efforts face numerous obstacles, including issues related to morphology, syntax, semantics, and cultural context. These challenges are compounded by the complexity of translating polysemous words, synonyms, idioms, and metaphors. This research employs qualitative methods, focusing on the translation processes, and offers solutions grounded in established translation techniques. By analyzing selected Quranic verses and creatively crafted Indonesian examples, the research highlights the importance of maintaining grammatical integrity, adapting idioms appropriately, and addressing untranslatability and collocations to ensure that translations are accurate and culturally relevant.

A Study of Difference and Identification between Homonymy and Polysemy

Lexical ambiguity is an essential problem in practical and applied language processing, but a few relatively information is available about what causes and effect the problem of lexical ambiguity. After many linguistic and professional researched lexical relations for a long time, people found that homonymy and polysemy are two well-known semantic problems. This paper mainly discusses the homonymy and polysemy from the definition, cause of formation, the principles of distinction and semantic ambiguity. At the same time, some methods of distinguishing homonymous and polysemous words are offered in one part of thesis. It is valuable reference for English learning, English teaching and cross-cultural communication.

Enhancing bilingual lexicon induction via harnessing polysemous words

Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) aims to induce word translation pairs across different languages. We find there is a large proportion of polysemous words in the dataset used by BLI, which impacts the quality of the induced translation pairs. In particular, the mainstream BLI models map two monolingual word embeddings (WEs) into a shared space and regard the closest cross-lingual words as translation pairs. However, when a word has multiple translations, it becomes challenging to ensure that the polysemous word is the closest neighbor to all its translations. Based on the analysis of polysemy, we propose a simple yet effective method by harnessing polysemous words to enhance BLI. We first detect polysemous words in the seed lexicons and filter their multiple translations by comparing their semantic similarities. Therefore, a refined seed lexicon mitigates the confusion caused by translations with divergent semantics for the BLI model. Moreover, in scenarios where only single translations are available in the seed lexicon, we propose to employ a Large Language Model (LLM) to acquire monolingual synonyms, thereby refining the structure of the seed lexicon more effectively. On benchmark BLI datasets, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to five state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline systems across almost all experimental language pairs, encompassing both sides of three similar language pairs and three distant language pairs.

From words to senses: A sense-based approach to quantitative polysemy detection across disciplines

Interdisciplinary polysemy refers to the phenomenon in which a word is understood and used differently across disciplines or fields. Nuanced variations in word meanings pose a significant challenge to effective communication and knowledge integration, especially in academic and professional settings. To address these issues, we propose the Interdisciplinary Polysemy Detection (IPD) method, which streamlines the identification of polysemous words by making the process more automatic, objective and efficient. IPD not only identifies polysemous words but also quantifies the extent of semantic variation within and across disciplines, providing deeper insights into the scale and nature of meaning shifts in different contexts. The evaluation results demonstrate that IPD can identify interdisciplinary polysemy effectively, showing heightened sensitivity to subtle differences in word senses. This sensitivity makes IPD a useful tool for both researchers and educators, helping to improve communication across fields and contributing to the development of more tailored pedagogical resources. The broader implications of this method may extend to enhancing the understanding of semantic variation in interdisciplinary research and advancing knowledge transfer between specialised domains.

VERBAL LEXEMES IN THE DERIVATIONAL CLUSTER WITH THE INITIAL WORD SALT IN THE NATIONAL RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

The article deals with semantic characteristics of verbal lexemes that are a part of the derivational cluster – a structural component of lexical and phraseological complex with the initial word salt. The paper analyses the role of the initial word in forming the complex, reveals the causes of semantic and amount differences of particular word clusters that are formed by different lexical and semantic variants of the polysemantic word salt. The article reveals the factors that influence the development of lexical item creative potential: extra linguistic, language system and intra-word ones. The article demonstrates the causes of the disproportion of analysed particular word clusters – factors that have positive and negative impact on word-formation activity of lexical and semantic variants of the word salt. Lexical items of different derivational stages ascending to two lexical and semantic variants of the initial word and items with erased inner form, that are on the periphery of the general word cluster, are analysed. The author develops a hypothesis about semantic connection of these items and lexical and semantic variants of the word salt. The possible reasons of metaphoric meanings appearing are shown. The article gives analysis of semantic shifts revealed in some derived words. The author comes to the conclusion about topicality of the denoted object for the native speakers and peculiarities of development and meaning extension of the word salt in verbal lexemes.

A Cognitive Analysis of “Power”

Cognitive linguistics, as a newly established method for the study of language that emerged in the 1970s, focuses on the study of general cognitive abilities and conceptual processes of human beings. With the development of society, many new lexical items and concepts emerge, and they all need to be encoded in the form of language expression. An economical and practical way is to give a word multiple meaning. Based on the prototypical theory of cognitive linguistics, this paper analyzed the semantic network and semantic distribution of the polysemous word “power.” Fourteen senses of “power” used as nouns were collected from the Oxford Advanced English-Chinese Dictionary (9th Edition), and connections between different senses were explored by analyzing the semantic features. Meanwhile, 100 sentences containing “power” were randomly extracted from the BNC corpus to figure out the distribution of different senses. It was found that the prototypical sense and extended senses of “power” revealed the characteristics of family resemblance, and extended senses centered on the prototypical sense and extended radially outward. Among the 14 senses of “power,” the sense of “political right” is the most commonly used, while the senses of “multiplication” and “deity” are rarely used. Finally, some suggestions on the teaching of polyseme are put forward hopefully to offer valuable guidance for English learners.

DIFFICULTIES OF TRANSLATING POLYSEMOUS LEXICAL ITEMS AND THE STRATEGIES ADOPTED: A CASE STUDY OF EFL LEARNERS AT SABER FACULTY OF SCIENCE AND EDUCATION – DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - UNIVERSITY OF LAHIJ

This study aimed to investigate the knowledge of the undergraduate students in translating three Arabic polysemous lexical items into English in different contexts. The research aimed to assess the student's proficiency in giving the meaning of polysemous words and measure their ability to select appropriate equivalents as well as the strategies adopted. The study involved thirty students from the Department of English, Saber Faculty of Science and Education. The participants carried out a translation test that contextualized three Arabic lexical polysemous lexical items (ضرب - حصر- تخفيف) within fifteen sentences. Statistical analysis of the data revealed a lack of knowledge among undergraduate students as they faced difficulties in constructing proper sentence patterns and a lack of competence in finding the exact English equivalents, resulting in challenges in selecting words that formed coherent English sentences and violating the sentence structure. Consequently, their production of correct English sentences was compromised. Furthermore, the study identified that the students relied on various language strategies, including L1 transfer, synonymy, avoidance, and paraphrasing, to facilitate their translation process. However, these strategies led to unsatisfactory English translations.

DECODING THE SEMANTIC VOLUME OF NOUNS WITH THE VERBAL MODALITY MÜSSEN: THE SYNERGISTIC DIMENSION OF LEAST EFFORT

The presented work is one of the stages of noun research within a certain verbal modality. The focus of the article lies in the study of the generating noun content in relation to the verbal modality müssen in German from the perspective of linguosynergetic scientific paradigm, which considers language as a complex dynamic system capable of self-organization and self-regulation. In this study methodologically important is the position that the synergetic law of making the least effort and conservation of speech energy is the driving factor of language development. In a synergetic sense, the author of the article draws parallels between the dictionary as a representative of the linguistic generalization of the structured amount of knowledge of the learned extraverbal reality and the mental lexicon, which is not an arbitrary accumulation of contributions, but constitutes a structured hierarchical system of such contributions. If lexical units in the synergetic sense and their meanings at the language level contain coded structured information, then in the same aspect the paper considers the implementation of the word in one of its meanings at the speech level as information decoding. The linguosynergetic format of the research proposed in this article assumes that language as a self-regulating system under the influence of external energy and information has developed a mechanism of different representations of nouns in syntactic constructions with different verbal modality in German-language fiction and press. The results obtained on the basis of the synergetic-quantitative approach are extrapolated to linguosynergetic models of self-organization of noun names according to the principle of minimization of efforts, which directs the human mental lexicon to optimal decoding of semantic volume of polysemic or monosemic nouns in relation to the verbal modality müssen in German-language fiction and press. It was proved that since the closest distances in the lexical structure of a word at the linguistic level are the closest in comparison with the structures of knowledge of the human mental lexicon, the construction of noun content in modern German on the synergetic principle of conservation of speech energy and minimization of efforts is the most optimal way of directing the mental lexicon of a person to decoding the semantic scope of the closets (main) meanings of the polysemic and unambiguous monosemic word models.

Transliteration in Chinese-to-English Translation from the Perspective of Xuanzang's "Five Principles of Non-Translation"

Xuanzang, a renowned translator of Buddhist scriptures in ancient Chinese history, advocated the use of transliteration in his translation theory, which is primarily reflected in his "Five Principles of Non-Translation". These principles primarily apply to five aspects: mysterious terms, polysemous words, borrowed words, conventionally translated terms, and special Buddhist terminology. This article delves into the transliteration methods employed in translating Chinese to other languages, drawing on the "Five Principles of Non-Translation". It examines the essence of this theory and its contemporary feasibility, highlighting the value of Xuanzang's principles.

Polysemies and the one representation hypothesis

Abstract Polysemy has attracted much interdisciplinary interest in recent times. Recent discussions in psycholinguistics focus on the different processing profiles of polysemous and homonymous words, and on how to explain such different profiles. Much current research assumes that while homonymous meanings are stored in different lexical entries in the mental lexicon, polysemous senses relate to just one lexical representation, be this a list of senses or a core meaning formed by features common to all the different senses. However, there is growing skepticism towards such a one-representation hypothesis. After differentiating regular and irregular polysemies along several dimensions (not only in terms of sense representation, but also in terms of sources, acquisition and word class distribution), this paper argues that the variants of the one representation model can meet some of the challenges that have been raised. However, there are further challenges that have not yet been considered. On the one hand, nested polysemies (senses generated on the basis of iterations of metonymies or metaphors) put some pressure on the idea that senses of irregular polysemies share some set of features. On the other hand, sharing some features that could constitute a core meaning may not be sufficient for entering in co-activation patterns. In sum, while the paper defends the one-representation hypothesis in the light of recent skepticism, it also calls for further research and an eventual reformulation of the hypothesis.

Language model based on deep learning network for biomedical named entity recognition

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (BioNER) is one of the most basic tasks in biomedical text mining, which aims to automatically identify and classify biomedical entities in text. Recently, deep learning-based methods have been applied to Biomedical Named Entity Recognition and have shown encouraging results. However, many biological entities are polysemous and ambiguous, which is one of the main obstacles to the task of biomedical named entity recognition. Deep learning methods require large amounts of training data, so the lack of data also affect the performance of model recognition. To solve the problem of polysemous words and insufficient data, for the task of biomedical named entity recognition, we propose a multi-task learning framework fused with language model based on the BiLSTM-CRF architecture. Our model uses a language model to design a differential encoding of the context, which could obtain dynamic word vectors to distinguish words in different datasets. Moreover, we use a multi-task learning method to collectively share the dynamic word vector of different types of entities to improve the recognition performance of each type of entity. Experimental results show that our model reduces the false positives caused by polysemous words through differentiated coding, and improves the performance of each subtask by sharing information between different entity data. Compared with other state-of-the art methods, our model achieved superior results in four typical training sets, and achieved the best results in F1 values.

Rendering of Verbal and Verbal-Visual Puns in Lithuanian-Dubbed Animated Film “Mr. Peabody and Sherman”

The rendering of verbal and verbal-visual puns in dubbing is a tough task that requires taking into account linguistic challenges, multimodal cohesion and dubbing synchronies. Thus, the aim of this research is to determine how verbal and verbal-visual puns are rendered from English into Lithuanian in the animated film Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014). There have been collected 27 cases of puns including 14 verbal (52%) and 13 verbal-visual (48%) puns. The categorisation of verbal and verbal-visual puns according to the type revealed that verbal puns contained examples of homonymy, homophony and paronymy, but paronymic verbal puns prevailed the most. Almost all cases of verbal-visual puns were homonymic because of their intersemiotic construction which is usually based on polysemous words. All cases of verbal and verbal-visual puns have been rendered by employing 3 translation techniques: PUN→PUN, PUN→NON-PUN, PUN→PUNOID. The prevailing technique for transferring verbal and verbal-visual puns was PUN→PUN, which reveals the translator’s attempt to tackle linguistic challenges and consider multimodal cohesion and dubbing synchronies.

Sense-aware connective-based indices of cohesion and their relationship to cohesion ratings of English language learners’ written production

Abstract The use of connectives has been considered important for assessing the cohesion of written texts (Crossley et al., 2019). However, existing connective-based indices have not systematically addressed two issues of ambiguity, namely, that between discourse and non-discourse use of polysemous word forms and that in terms of the specific discourse relations marked by polysemous discourse connectives (Pitler & Nenkova, 2009). This study proposes 34 sense-aware connective-based indices of cohesion that account for these issues and assesses their predictive power for cohesion ratings in comparison to 25 existing indices. Results from the analysis of 3,911 argumentative essays from the English Language Learner Insight, Proficiency and Skills Evaluation Corpus show that 23 sense-aware indices but only three existing indices correlated significantly and meaningfully with cohesion ratings. The sense-aware indices also exhibited greater predictive power for cohesion ratings than existing indices. The implications of our findings for future cohesion research are discussed.

Polysemy—Evidence from Linguistics, Behavioral Science, and Contextualized Language Models

Abstract Polysemy is the type of lexical ambiguity where a word has multiple distinct but related interpretations. In the past decade, it has been the subject of a great many studies across multiple disciplines including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics, which have made it increasingly clear that the complexity of polysemy precludes simple, universal answers, especially concerning the representation and processing of polysemous words. But fuelled by the growing availability of large, crowdsourced datasets providing substantial empirical evidence; improved behavioral methodology; and the development of contextualized language models capable of encoding the fine-grained meaning of a word within a given context, the literature on polysemy recently has developed more complex theoretical analyses. In this survey we discuss these recent contributions to the investigation of polysemy against the backdrop of a long legacy of research across multiple decades and disciplines. Our aim is to bring together different perspectives to achieve a more complete picture of the heterogeneity and complexity of the phenomenon of polysemy. Specifically, we highlight evidence supporting a range of hybrid models of the mental processing of polysemes. These hybrid models combine elements from different previous theoretical approaches to explain patterns and idiosyncrasies in the processing of polysemous that the best known models so far have failed to account for. Our literature review finds that (i) traditional analyses of polysemy can be limited in their generalizability by loose definitions and selective materials; (ii) linguistic tests provide useful evidence on individual cases, but fail to capture the full range of factors involved in the processing of polysemous sense extensions; and (iii) recent behavioral (psycho) linguistics studies, large-scale annotation efforts, and investigations leveraging contextualized language models provide accumulating evidence suggesting that polysemous sense similarity covers a wide spectrum between identity of sense and homonymy-like unrelatedness of meaning. We hope that the interdisciplinary account of polysemy provided in this survey inspires further fundamental research on the nature of polysemy and better equips applied research to deal with the complexity surrounding the phenomenon, for example, by enabling the development of benchmarks and testing paradigms for large language models informed by a greater portion of the rich evidence on the phenomenon currently available.

RSRNeT: a novel multi-modal network framework for named entity recognition and relation extraction

Named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) are two important technologies employed in knowledge extraction for constructing knowledge graphs. Uni-modal NER and RE approaches solely rely on text information for knowledge extraction, leading to various limitations, such as suboptimal performance and low efficiency in recognizing polysemous words. With the development of multi-modal learning, multi-modal named entity recognition (MNER) and multi-modal relation extraction (MRE) have been introduced to improve recognition performance. However, existing MNER and MRE methods often encounter reduced efficiency when the text includes unrelated images. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-modal network framework for named entity recognition and relation extraction called RSRNeT. In RSRNeT, we focus on extracting visual features more fully and designing a multi-scale visual feature extraction module based on ResNeSt network. On the other hand, we also emphasize fusing multi-modal features more comprehensively while minimizing interference from irrelevant images. To address this issue, we propose a multi-modal feature fusing module based on RoBERTa network. These two modules enable us to learn superior visual and textual representations, reducing errors caused by irrelevant images. Our approach has undergone extensive evaluation and comparison with various baseline models on MNER and MRE tasks. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in recall and F1 score on three public datasets: Twitter2015, Twitter2017 and MNRE.

How Fast Do Distribution and Semantics of Polysemic Words Change?

Creation of large diachronic text corpora triggered studies of evolution of natural languages using quantitative methods in the last decade. For the first time, it became possible to raise questions about general patterns of lexical semantic change. In the work by W. Hamilton et al., 2016, a hypothesis was formulated about a more rapid change in the meanings of polysemic words. In this paper, we consider how frequency of words influence variations of semantic metrics. We use explicit word vector representations and Jensen-Shannon divergence as a measure of change in the distribution and semantics of a word. The obtained results show that changes in the frequency ratio of a word in different meanings can themselves lead to a change in a word distribution, even in the absence of any changes in its meaning. Therefore, the observations made in the work by W. Hamilton et al about correlation between the rate of change of words and their local cluster coefficient in the semantic connection network (considered as a quantitative measure of polysemy) can be fully explained by the effect described in the article.

Метафора дыма: реконструкция культурных смыслов (на материале якутской лингвокультуры)

The paper examines the linguistic and cultural semantics of the Yakut word buruo (smoke) by exploring its metaphorical manifestations in vocabulary, phraseology, and folklore. The folklore text is analyzed using a structural-semiotic approach to examine language as a cultural verbal code. For the first time, the smoke metaphor is recognized as a source of riddles, proverbs, good wishes, incantations, euphemisms, and others. Otherwise, the metaphor is found to have meaning- and text-forming functions. In the Yakut linguoculture, the smoke metaphor creates a micro paradigm of linguistic units with the general semantics of “descendants, a continuation of the family.” The metaphor under study is suggested to be a cultural element of the Sakha people’s folklore, specifically related to the patriarchal family structure and the roles of sons and daughters in procreation. The smoke metaphor, a tool for creating new concepts and pictorial means in language and culture, proves to be an element of the informational structures of oral collective memory. It preserves the principle of patrilineage, gender stereotypes, and traditional ideas of the Sakha people about the succession of generations and procreation, understood as “development, advancement through stages of development.” A significant finding is that a polysemous word, phraseology, paremy, epithet, folklore formula, symbol, and others can preserve considerable information in a coiled form and serve as an optimal way of its oral transmission in time and space. To conclude, folklore text metaphors are not only emotionally rich but also involve “condensed” meaning, with a symbol representing the information compression.

THE PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATING ENGLISH POLYSEMOUS WORDS INTO KARAKALPAK LANGUAGE

The article deals with the problems in translating English polysemous words into Karakalpak language. Translating English polysemous words into the Karakalpak language requires careful consideration of context, cultural nuances, and the multiple meanings of the words. It is a complex process that requires skilled translators to accurately convey the intended meaning to the target audience. According to the result of the research, polysemous words are words that have multiple meanings or interpretations, and translating them accurately requires a deep understanding of the context and cultural nuances.