Between Century and Poet: Graph-Based Lexical Semantic Change in Persian Poetry
The meaning embedded in Persian poetry is a complex interplay of historical depth and relational context. Words within this literary tradition endure through time, yet their meanings evolve as they interact with various poetic voices, rhetorical frameworks, and the shifting landscape of neighboring words. A recent study, documented in arXiv:2604.06674v1, investigates this intricate process by employing aligned Word2Vec spaces in conjunction with graph-based neighborhood analysis across different centuries and notable poets.
Traditional models of semantic change often focus solely on vector displacement, overlooking the nuanced reality of lexical history. This research proposes an alternative view, conceptualizing semantic change as a form of rewiring within local semantic graphs. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the gain or loss of neighbors, shifts in roles within the semantic community, and the movement of words across various contexts.
Methodology and Focus
The analysis is centered on twenty target words, anchored by five recurrent reference terms: Earth, Night, two wine terms, and Heart. Surrounding these core words are a range of affective, courtly, elemental, and Sufi concepts, including Love, Sorrow, Dervish, King, Annihilation, and Truth. This selection allows for a comprehensive exploration of how these words have transformed over time and across different poetic styles.
Key Findings
The findings of the study reveal distinct patterns of semantic change among the target words:
- Night: Exhibits a greater sensitivity to temporal shifts, reflecting changes in how it is perceived across periods.
- Earth: Shows variability based on the poet’s individual style, indicating a more poet-sensitive nature.
- Heart: Displays continuity over time, even as its role within the semantic graph changes.
- Wine Terms: Highlight differences in probe sensitivity; one term is broad and semantically diffuse, while the other remains narrower and more stable.
Furthermore, a lexical audit of the corpus confirms the presence of historically driven terms, poet-specific usages, and a sparse collection of mystical vocabulary that necessitates careful interpretation. This complexity underscores the need for a nuanced approach to understanding semantic change within Persian poetry.
Implications for Digital Humanities
Overall, the research suggests that semantic change in Persian poetry is more effectively captured through the lens of neighborhood rewiring rather than as abstract drift. For the field of Digital Humanities, this approach reintroduces local structure to computational analysis, aligning interpretations more closely with literary practices. The concepts of persistence, migration, mediation, and selective transformation become critical in understanding the evolution of meaning in Persian poetry.
This study not only contributes to our comprehension of Persian literary tradition but also offers a valuable framework for analyzing semantic change in other literary contexts, emphasizing the importance of relational dynamics in language.