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. Linguistic 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.