A machine learning
algorithm programmed to identify images of coffee cups might compare photos of random objects
against a
database of coffee cup pictures; by examining more images, it systematically learns the features to make a positive ID more quickly and accurately.
After developing the computational
algorithms that predicted the historical order in which the senses of a word have emerged, the team tested these predictions
against records of English over the past millennium using the Historical Thesaurus of English, a large
database in which each of a word's many senses is marked for its date of emergence into the language.