A framework for analyzing semantic change of words across time

Abstract

Recently, large amounts of historical texts have been digitized and made accessible to the public. Thanks to this, for the first time, it became possible to analyze evolution of language through the use of automatic approaches. In this paper, we show the results of an exploratory analysis aiming to investigate methods for studying and visualizing changes in word meaning over time. In particular, we propose a framework for exploring semantic change at the lexical level, at the contrastive-pair level, and at the sentiment orientation level. We demonstrate several kinds of NLP approaches that altogether give users deeper understanding of word evolution. We use two diachronic corpora that are currently the largest available historical language corpora. Our results indicate that the task is feasible and satisfactory outcomes can be already achieved by using simple approaches.