Categories are not invariant. This paper attempts to explore the dynamic nature of semantic category, in particular, that of fashion language, based on the cognitive theory of Dawkins’ memetics, a new theory of cultural evolution. Semantic attributes of linguistic memes decrease or proliferate in replication and spreading, which involves a dynamic development of semantic category. More specific...

Semantic Orientation refers to the positive or negative attitude, standpoint or opinion on a certain person, object or affair. It is of degree diversity and combinability. Rule-based computation of SO for Chinese sentence, after pre-processing the input sentence in lexical and dependency syntax analysis, takes advantage of the syntax analysis results and combines the pre-compiled dictionary res...

The meanings of words are not fixed but in fact undergo change, with new word senses arising and established senses taking on new aspects of meaning or falling out of usage. Two types of semantic change are amelioration and pejoration; in these processes a word sense changes to become more positive or negative, respectively. In this first computational study of amelioration and pejoration we ad...

The evaluative character of a word is called its semantic orientation (SO). A positive SO indicates desirability (e.g. Good, Honest) and a negative SO indicates undesirability (e.g., Bad, Ugly). This paper presents a method, based on Turney (2003), for inferring the SO of a word from its statistical association with strongly-polarized words and morphemes in Chinese. It is noted that morphemes a...

We propose a novel method to construct semantic orientation lexicons using large data and a thesaurus. To deal with large data, we use Count-Min sketch to store the approximate counts of all word pairs in a bounded space of 8GB. We use a thesaurus (like Roget) to constrain near-synonymous words to have the same polarity. This framework can easily scale to any language with a thesaurus and a unz...

Rapid increase in internet users along with growing power of online review sites and social media has given birth to sentiment analysis or opinion mining, which aims at determining what other people think and comment. Sentiments or Opinions contain public generated content about products, services, policies and politics. People are usually interested to seek positive and negative opinions conta...

Recent studies challenged the classical notion of automaticity and indicated that even unconscious automatic semantic processing is under attentional control to some extent. In line with our attentional sensitization model, these data suggest that a sensitization of semantic pathways by a semantic task set is necessary for subliminal semantic priming to occur while non-semantic task sets attenu...