WordWars: A Dataset to Examine the Natural Selection of Words

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3087–3095 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3087 WordWars: A Dataset to Examine the Natural Selection of Words Saif M. Mohammad National Research Council Canada saif.mohammad@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca Abstract There is a growing body of work on how word meaning changes over time: mutation. In contrast, there is very little work on how different words compete to represent the same meaning, and how the degree of success of words in that competition changes over time: natural selection. We present a new dataset, WordWars, with historical frequency data from the early 1800s to the early 2000s for monosemous English words in over 5000 synsets. We explore three broad questions with the dataset: (1) what is the degree to which predominant words in these synsets have changed, (2) how do prominent word features such as frequency, length, and concreteness impact natural selection, and (3) what are the differences between the predominant words of the 2000s and the predominant words of early 1800s. We show that close to one third of the synsets undergo a change in the predominant word in this time period. Manual annotation of these pairs shows that about 15% of these are orthographic variations, 25% involve affix changes, and 60% have completely different roots. We find that frequency, length, and concreteness all impact natural selection, albeit in different ways. Keywords: Natural selection, lexical semantics, words, evolution, word length, frequency, concreteness 1. Introduction We rely on words to articulate our thoughts. The goal is often not just to be precise, but also to be clear and compelling.1 Since multiple words can represent the same meaning (for example, allowable and permissible), we of- ten make decisions on which words to use from sets of known synonyms.2 For example, in the current day, it more common to say: talking while chewing is not permissible rather than allowable. Collectively, as speakers of a lan- guage we choose some words more frequently than others, to represent a meaning. Occasionally new words emerge, and every now and then some words fall out of favour so much that they may be considered extinct. Thus it is not surprising that prominent thinkers of the past, including Charles Darwin, have argued that just as there is a natural selection in the plant and animal species over time, there is a natural selection of words over time (Darwin, 1968; Darwin, 2003). In this analogy, word type maps to a species, and word frequency maps to the species population. Thus the creation and use of a new word is akin to the birth of a new species, the wide-spread use of a word is akin to the thriving of a species, and the complete lack of use of a word is akin to the extinction of a species. Over the last few years, there has been a spurt of re- search on historical language change, especially on how the meaning of a …

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