Room to Glo: A Systematic Comparison of Semantic Change Detection Approaches with Word Embeddings

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


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.
Anthology ID:
D19-1007
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
66–76
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1007
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1007
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Philippa Shoemark, Farhana Ferdousi Liza, Dong Nguyen, Scott Hale, and Barbara McGillivray. 2019. Room to Glo: A Systematic Comparison of Semantic Change Detection Approaches with Word Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 66–76, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Room to Glo: A Systematic Comparison of Semantic Change Detection Approaches with Word Embeddings (Shoemark et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/D19-1007.pdf