Room to Glo: A systematic comparison of semantic change detection approaches with word embeddings

Philippa Shoemark, Farhana Ferdousi Liza, Dong Nguyen, Scott A. Hale, Barbara McGillivray

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

57 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Word embeddings are increasingly used for the automatic detection of semantic change; yet, a robust evaluation and systematic comparison of the choices involved has been lacking. We propose a new evaluation framework for semantic change detection and find that (i) using the whole time series is preferable over only comparing between the first and last time points; (ii) independently trained and aligned embeddings perform better than continuously trained embeddings for long time periods; and (iii) that the reference point for comparison matters. We also present an analysis of the changes detected on a large Twitter dataset spanning 5.5 years.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 - 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Pages66-76
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781950737901
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 - Hong Kong, China
Duration: 3 Nov 20197 Nov 2019

Conference

Conference2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHong Kong
Period3/11/197/11/19

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