Analyzing Continuous Semantic Shifts with Diachronic Word Similarity Matrices
Hajime Kiyama, Taichi Aida, Mamoru Komachi, Toshinobu Ogiso, Hiroya Takamura, Daichi Mochihashi
Abstract
The meanings and relationships of words shift over time. This phenomenon is referred to as semantic shift. Research focused on understanding how semantic shifts occur over multiple time periods is essential for gaining a detailed understanding of semantic shifts. However, detecting change points only between adjacent time periods is insufficient for analyzing detailed semantic shifts, and using BERT-based methods to examine word sense proportions incurs a high computational cost. To address those issues, we propose a simple yet intuitive framework for how semantic shifts occur over multiple time periods by utilizing similarity matrices based on word embeddings. We calculate diachronic word similarity matrices using fast and lightweight word embeddings across arbitrary time periods, making it deeper to analyze continuous semantic shifts. Additionally, by clustering the resulting similarity matrices, we can categorize words that exhibit similar behavior of semantic shift in an unsupervised manner.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kiyama-etal-2025-analyzing,
title = "Analyzing Continuous Semantic Shifts with Diachronic Word Similarity Matrices",
author = "Kiyama, Hajime and
Aida, Taichi and
Komachi, Mamoru and
Ogiso, Toshinobu and
Takamura, Hiroya and
Mochihashi, Daichi",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.109/",
pages = "1613--1631"
}