Terrence Szymanski


2018

pdf
Diachronic word embeddings and semantic shifts: a survey
Andrey Kutuzov | Lilja Øvrelid | Terrence Szymanski | Erik Velldal
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Recent years have witnessed a surge of publications aimed at tracing temporal changes in lexical semantics using distributional methods, particularly prediction-based word embedding models. However, this vein of research lacks the cohesion, common terminology and shared practices of more established areas of natural language processing. In this paper, we survey the current state of academic research related to diachronic word embeddings and semantic shifts detection. We start with discussing the notion of semantic shifts, and then continue with an overview of the existing methods for tracing such time-related shifts with word embedding models. We propose several axes along which these methods can be compared, and outline the main challenges before this emerging subfield of NLP, as well as prospects and possible applications.

2017

pdf
Temporal Word Analogies: Identifying Lexical Replacement with Diachronic Word Embeddings
Terrence Szymanski
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

This paper introduces the concept of temporal word analogies: pairs of words which occupy the same semantic space at different points in time. One well-known property of word embeddings is that they are able to effectively model traditional word analogies (“word w1 is to word w2 as word w3 is to word w4”) through vector addition. Here, I show that temporal word analogies (“word w1 at time t𝛼 is like word w2 at time t𝛽”) can effectively be modeled with diachronic word embeddings, provided that the independent embedding spaces from each time period are appropriately transformed into a common vector space. When applied to a diachronic corpus of news articles, this method is able to identify temporal word analogies such as “Ronald Reagan in 1987 is like Bill Clinton in 1997”, or “Walkman in 1987 is like iPod in 2007”.

2015

pdf
UCD : Diachronic Text Classification with Character, Word, and Syntactic N-grams
Terrence Szymanski | Gerard Lynch
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)

2011

pdf
BALLGAME: A Corpus for Computational Semantics
Ezra Keshet | Terrence Szymanski | Stephen Tyndall
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2011)