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.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.109
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1613–1631
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.109/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hajime Kiyama, Taichi Aida, Mamoru Komachi, Toshinobu Ogiso, Hiroya Takamura, and Daichi Mochihashi. 2025. Analyzing Continuous Semantic Shifts with Diachronic Word Similarity Matrices. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1613–1631, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analyzing Continuous Semantic Shifts with Diachronic Word Similarity Matrices (Kiyama et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.109.pdf