Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".