Applying Word Embeddings to Measure the Semantic Adaptation of English Loanwords in Japanese and Korean

Abstract

With the internationalization of English, many English words are used as loanwords around the world. These English loanwords can bring about confusion, however, as the semantic usage of a loanword often differs from region to region. Therefore, it is important to examine how the semantic adaptation of a given English loanword has occurred when it is introduced into the lexicon of a country. The word vector model has been used to study semantic changes. In this paper, using these techniques, we investigate the semantic adaptation of English loanwords in Japanese and Korean. In addition, we investigate the correlation between the number of meanings of original English words and cosine similarity. As a result, we have brought a new insight into the computational contrastive semantics.