Alexa, how do word senses evolve?

(Lehigh University) A paper called 'Algorithms in the historical emergence of word senses'--that appears online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)--is the first to look at 1,000 years of English development and detect the kinds of algorithms that human minds have used to extend existing words to new senses of meaning. This kind of 'reverse engineering' of how human language has developed could have implications for natural language processing by machines.
Source: EurekAlert! - Social and Behavioral Science - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: news