Homophone2Vec: Embedding Space Analysis for Empirical Evaluation of Phonological and Semantic Similarity
Abstract
AbstractThis paper introduces a novel method for empirically evaluating the relationship between the phonological and semantic similarity of linguistic units using embedding spaces. Chinese character homophones are used as a proof-of-concept. We employ cosine similarity as a proxy for semantic similarity between characters, and compare relationships between phonologically-related characters and baseline characters (chosen as similar-frequency characters). We show there is a strongly statistically significant positive semantic relationship among different Chinese characters at varying levels of sound-sharing. We also perform some basic probing using t-SNE and UMAP visualizations, and indicate directions for future applications of this method.