Generating Timelines by Modeling Semantic Change

Guy D. Rosin, Kira Radinsky


Abstract
Though languages can evolve slowly, they can also react strongly to dramatic world events. By studying the connection between words and events, it is possible to identify which events change our vocabulary and in what way. In this work, we tackle the task of creating timelines - records of historical “turning points”, represented by either words or events, to understand the dynamics of a target word. Our approach identifies these points by leveraging both static and time-varying word embeddings to measure the influence of words and events. In addition to quantifying changes, we show how our technique can help isolate semantic changes. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that we are able to capture this semantic change and event influence.
Anthology ID:
K19-1018
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Mohit Bansal, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
186–195
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1018
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K19-1018
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guy D. Rosin and Kira Radinsky. 2019. Generating Timelines by Modeling Semantic Change. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 186–195, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Timelines by Modeling Semantic Change (Rosin & Radinsky, CoNLL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1018.pdf
Supplementary material:
 K19-1018.Supplementary_Material.zip
Code
 guyrosin/generating_timelines