(Chat)GPT v BERT Dawn of Justice for Semantic Change Detection

Francesco Periti, Haim Dubossarsky, Nina Tahmasebi


Abstract
In the universe of Natural Language Processing, Transformer-based language models like BERT and (Chat)GPT have emerged as lexical superheroes with great power to solve open research problems. In this paper, we specifically focus on the temporal problem of semantic change, and evaluate their ability to solve two diachronic extensions of the Word-in-Context (WiC) task: TempoWiC and HistoWiC. In particular, we investigate the potential of a novel, off-the-shelf technology like ChatGPT (and GPT) 3.5 compared to BERT, which represents a family of models that currently stand as the state-of-the-art for modeling semantic change. Our experiments represent the first attempt to assess the use of (Chat)GPT for studying semantic change. Our results indicate that ChatGPT performs significantly worse than the foundational GPT version. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that (Chat)GPT achieves slightly lower performance than BERT in detecting long-term changes but performs significantly worse in detecting short-term changes.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-eacl.29
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
420–436
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.29
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Francesco Periti, Haim Dubossarsky, and Nina Tahmasebi. 2024. (Chat)GPT v BERT Dawn of Justice for Semantic Change Detection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 420–436, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
(Chat)GPT v BERT Dawn of Justice for Semantic Change Detection (Periti et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.29.pdf
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