We present a manually annotated lexical semantic change dataset for Russian: RuShiftEval. Its novelty is ensured by a single set of target words annotated for their diachronic semantic shifts across three time periods, while the previous work either
used only two time periods, or different sets of target words. The paper describes the composition and annotation procedure for the dataset. In addition, it is shown how the ternary nature of RuShiftEval allows to trace specific diachronic trajectories: changed at a particular time period and stable afterwards' or was changing throughout all time periods'. Based on the analysis of the submissions to the recent shared task on semantic change detection for Russian, we argue that correctly identifying such trajectories can be an interesting sub-task itself.
Just as the meaning of words is tied to the communities in which they are used, so too is semantic change. But how does lexical semantic change manifest differently across different communities? In this work, we investigate the relationship between c
ommunity structure and semantic change in 45 communities from the social media website Reddit. We use distributional methods to quantify lexical semantic change and induce a social network on communities, based on interactions between members. We explore the relationship between semantic change and the clustering coefficient of a community's social network graph, as well as community size and stability. While none of these factors are found to be significant on their own, we report a significant effect of their three-way interaction. We also report on significant word-level effects of frequency and change in frequency, which replicate previous findings.
Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. We cross-linguistically investigate the semantic divergence of cognate pairs in English and Romance languages, by means of word embeddings. To this end, we introduce
a new curated dataset of cognates in all pairs of those languages. We describe the types of errors that occurred during the automated cognate identification process and manually correct them. Additionally, we label the English cognates according to their etymology, separating them into two groups: old borrowings and recent borrowings. On this curated dataset, we analyse word properties such as frequency and polysemy, and the distribution of similarity scores between cognate sets in different languages. We automatically identify different clusters of English cognates, setting a new direction of research in cognates, borrowings and possibly false friends analysis in related languages.
Several cluster-based methods for semantic change detection with contextual embeddings emerged recently. They allow a fine-grained analysis of word use change by aggregating embeddings into clusters that reflect the different usages of the word. Howe
ver, these methods are unscalable in terms of memory consumption and computation time. Therefore, they require a limited set of target words to be picked in advance. This drastically limits the usability of these methods in open exploratory tasks, where each word from the vocabulary can be considered as a potential target. We propose a novel scalable method for word usage-change detection that offers large gains in processing time and significant memory savings while offering the same interpretability and better performance than unscalable methods. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method by analysing a large corpus of news articles about COVID-19.
