DiaWUG: A Dataset for Diatopic Lexical Semantic Variation in Spanish

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 2601–2609 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 2601 DiaWUG: A Dataset for Diatopic Lexical Semantic Variation in Spanish Gioia Baldissin, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart Pfaffenwaldring 5b, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany {baldisga,schlecdk,schulte}@ims.uni-stuttgart.de Abstract We provide a novel dataset – DiaWUG – with judgements on diatopic lexical semantic variation for six Spanish variants in Europe and Latin America. In contrast to most previous meaning-based resources and studies on semantic diatopic variation, we collect annotations on semantic relatedness for Spanish target words in their contexts from both a semasiological perspective (i.e., exploring the meanings of a word given its form, thus including polysemy) and an onomasiological perspective (i.e., exploring identical meanings of words with different forms, thus including synonymy). In addition, our novel dataset exploits and extends the existing framework DURel for annotating word senses in context (Erk et al., 2013; Schlechtweg et al., 2018) and the framework-embedded Word Usage Graphs (WUGs) – which up to now have mainly be used for semasiological tasks and resources – in order to distinguish, visualize and interpret lexical semantic vari- ation of contextualized words in Spanish from these two perspectives, i.e., semasiological and onomasiological language variation. Keywords: diatopic variation, semasiology, onomasiology, semantic relatedness, word usage graphs 1. Introduction Theoretical and empirical investigations of language variation in dialectology have a long history and draw on a rich variety of linguistic features on the pho- netic, phonological, morphological, semantic and syn- tactic levels (Boberg et al., 2018). Computational ap- proaches to dialectology, however, have been more lim- ited and rarely address language variation regarding lexical meaning, as in Franco et al. (2019). In contrast, lexical semantics has been a major focus of computa- tional research in other types of language variation, such as diachronic (Kutuzov et al., 2018; Bizzoni et al., 2020; Schlechtweg et al., 2020; Zamora-Reina et al., 2022), diastratic (Frassinelli et al., 2021) and domain-specific sense variation (Pérez, 2016; Hätty et al., 2019). As to our knowledge, only one approach up to date has worked on the intersection of the above, i.e., sense varia- tions in diatopic language varieties (Franco et al., 2019). Diatopic variation is not only relevant for mere sociolin- guistic, lexicographic and lexicological purposes, but may be extended to the more general case of word sense disambiguation studies. In the current paper we provide a novel dataset for diatopic sense variation in Spanish, making use of an actual sample of the language to ex- plore synchronic variation, rather than relying on static manual resources such as dialect dictionaries (Franco et al., 2019). For this, we activate both sense-related per- spectives, the semasiological perspective (i.e., exploring the meanings of a word given its form, thus including polysemy) and the onomasiological perspective (i.e., ex- ploring related meanings of words with different forms, thus including synonymy). This resource is intended to function as a gold standard …

Content truncated to 500 words