Infinite Mixture Chaining: An Efficiency-Based Framework for the Dynamic Construction of Word Meaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The lexicon is an evolving symbolic system that expresses an unbounded set of emerging meanings with a limited vocabulary. As a result, words often extend to new meanings. Decades of research have suggested that word meaning extension is non-arbitrary, and recent work formalizes this process as cognitive models of semantic chaining whereby emerging meanings link to existing ones that are semantically close. Existing approaches have typically focused on a dichotomous formulation of chaining, couched in the exemplar or prototype theories of categorization. However, these accounts yield either memory-intensive or simplistic representations of meaning, while evidence for them is mixed. We propose a unified probabilistic framework, infinite mixture chaining, that derives different forms of chaining through the lens of cognitive efficiency. This framework subsumes the existing chaining models as a trade-off between representational accuracy and memory complexity, and it contributes a flexible class of models that supports the dynamic construction of word meaning by automatically forming semantic clusters informed by existing and novel usages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework in reconstructing the historical development of the lexicon across multiple word classes and in different languages, and we also show that it correlates with human judgment of semantic change. Our study offers an efficiency-based view on the cognitive mechanisms of word meaning extension in the evolution of the lexicon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".