SemAxis: A Lightweight Framework to Characterize Domain-Specific Word Semantics Beyond Sentiment

Abstract

Because word semantics can substantially change across communities and contexts, capturing domain-specific word semantics is an important challenge. Here, we propose SEMAXIS, a simple yet powerful framework to characterize word semantics using many semantic axes in wordvector spaces beyond sentiment. We demonstrate that SEMAXIS can capture nuanced semantic representations in multiple online communities. We also show that, when the sentiment axis is examined, SEMAXIS outperforms the state-of-theart approaches in building domain-specific sentiment lexicons.