@InProceedings{dubossarsky-weinshall-grossman:2017:EMNLP2017,
  author    = {Dubossarsky, Haim  and  Weinshall, Daphna  and  Grossman, Eitan},
  title     = {Outta Control: Laws of Semantic Change and Inherent Biases in Word Representation Models},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  month     = {September},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {1136--1145},
  abstract  = {This article evaluates three proposed laws of semantic change. Our claim is
	that in order to validate a putative law of semantic change, the effect should
	be observed in the genuine condition but absent or reduced in a suitably
	matched control condition, in which no change can possibly have taken place.
	Our analysis shows that the effects reported in recent literature must be
	substantially revised: (i) the proposed negative correlation between meaning
	change and word frequency is shown to be largely an artefact of the models of
	word representation used; (ii) the proposed negative correlation between
	meaning change and prototypicality is shown to be much weaker than what has
	been claimed in prior art; and (iii) the proposed positive correlation between
	meaning change and polysemy is largely an artefact of word frequency. These
	empirical observations are corroborated by analytical proofs that show that
	count representations introduce an inherent dependence on word frequency, and
	thus word frequency cannot be evaluated as an independent factor with these
	representations.},
  url       = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D17-1118}
}