A Methodology for Building a Diachronic Dataset of Semantic Shifts and its Application to QC-FR-Diac-V1.0, a Free Reference for French

David Kletz, Philippe Langlais, François Lareau, Patrick Drouin

Abstract
Different algorithms have been proposed to detect semantic shifts (changes in a word meaning over time) in a diachronic corpus. Yet, and somehow surprisingly, no reference corpus has been designed so far to evaluate them, leaving researchers to fallback to troublesome evaluation strategies. In this work, we introduce a methodology for the construction of a reference dataset for the evaluation of semantic shift detection, that is, a list of words where we know for sure whether they present a word meaning change over a period of interest. We leverage a state-of-the-art word-sense disambiguation model to associate a date of first appearance to all the senses of a word. Significant changes in sense distributions as well as clear stability are detected and the resulting words are inspected by experts using a dedicated interface before populating a reference dataset. As a proof of concept, we apply this methodology to a corpus of newspapers from Quebec covering the whole 20th century. We manually verified a subset of candidates, leading to QC-FR-Diac-V1.0, a corpus of 151 words allowing one to evaluate the identification of semantic shifts in French between 1910 and 1990.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.228
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2117–2125
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.228
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
David Kletz, Philippe Langlais, François Lareau, and Patrick Drouin. 2022. A Methodology for Building a Diachronic Dataset of Semantic Shifts and its Application to QC-FR-Diac-V1.0, a Free Reference for French. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2117–2125, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Methodology for Building a Diachronic Dataset of Semantic Shifts and its Application to QC-FR-Diac-V1.0, a Free Reference for French (Kletz et al., LREC 2022)
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