Conceptual Engineers want to make words better. However, they often underestimate how varied our usage of words is. In this paper, we take the first steps in exploring the contextual nuances of words by creating conceptual landscapes -- 2D surfaces representing the pragmatic usage of words -- that conceptual engineers can use to inform their projects. We use the spoken component of the British National Corpus and BERT to create contextualised word embeddings, and use Gaussian Mixture Models, a selection of metrics, and qualitative analysis to visualise and numerically represent lexical landscapes. Such an approach has not yet been used in the conceptual engineering literature and provides a detailed examination of how different words manifest in various contexts that is potentially useful to conceptual engineering projects. Our findings highlight the inherent complexity of conceptual engineering, revealing that each word exhibits a unique and intricate landscape. Conceptual Engineers cannot, therefore, use a one-size-fits-all approach when improving words -- a task that may be practically intractable at scale.

翻译：概念工程师希望优化词语。然而，他们常常低估词语使用方式的多样性。本文通过构建概念景观——即表征词语语用用法的二维曲面——为探索词语的语境细微差别迈出第一步，这些景观可为概念工程项目提供参考。我们使用英国国家语料库的口语部分和BERT生成情境化词向量，并采用高斯混合模型、一系列度量指标及定性分析来可视化并数值化表征词汇景观。该方法尚未在概念工程文献中使用，能细致考察不同词语如何在多样语境中呈现，对概念工程项目具有潜在实用价值。我们的研究结果凸显了概念工程固有的复杂性，揭示每个词语都展现出独特而精细的景观。因此，概念工程师在优化词语时无法采用“一刀切”的方法——这项任务在大规模实践中可能难以实现。