Exploiting the Web for Semantic Change Detection

Abstract

Detecting significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words has gained more attention over the last few years. Linguis- tic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where words’ meaning can change rapidly. In this work, we describe the construction of a large diachronic corpus that relies on the UK Web Archive and we propose a preliminary analysis of semantic change detection exploiting a particular technique called Temporal Random Indexing. Results of the evaluation are promising and give us important insights for further investigations.