Improving Semantic Change Analysis by Combining Word Embeddings and Word Frequencies

  • Author:

    Adrian Englhardt, Jens Willkomm, Martin Schäler, Klemens Böhm

  • Source:

    International Journal on Digital Libraries (2020). DOI: 10.1007/s00799-019-00271-6

  • Date: 20.05.2019
  • This is the supplementary material for the article "Improving Semantic Change Analysis by Combining Word Embeddings and Word Frequencies"

    Abstract Language is constantly evolving. As part of diachronic linguistics, semantic change analysis examines how the meanings of words evolve over time. Such semantic awareness is important for web search, to adapt to recent hypes or trends. Recent research on semantic change analysis relying on word embeddings has yielded significant improvements over previous work. However, a recent, but somewhat neglected observation so far is that the rate of semantic shift negatively correlates with word-usage frequency. In this article, we therefore propose SCAF, Semantic Change Analysis with Frequency. It abstracts from the concrete embeddings and includes word frequencies as an orthogonal feature. SCAF allows using different combinations of embedding type, optimization algorithm and alignment method. Additionally, we leverage existing approaches for time series analysis, by using change detection methods to identify semantic shifts. In an evaluation with a realistic setup, SCAF achieves better detection rates than prior approaches, 95% instead of 51%. On the Google Books Ngram data set, our approach detects both known as well as yet unknown shifts for popular words.

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Supplementary Material

Source Code

The source code for the publication is available as a Python package here. It contains the scripts to train and evaluate embeddings, build the SCAF time series model and perform the semantic change detection. The package also contains a notebook that demonstrates how SCAF works for a basic example, starting from raw text up to the final detection. The code is licensed under a MIT License.

Embedding models

Here we provide all the embedding models we have trained for the publication. A configuration that specifies the values for all the parameters is included. The configuration file can be used to retrain the embeddings with the source code from above. First we list the embeddings trained for the parameter evaluation in Section 5.1:
  • Synthetic corpus parameter evaluation: [2.9 GB]
  • Books corpus parameter evaluation: [2.7 GB]

The following tables contain the embeddings used in Section 5.2 and 5.3. The perturbation list of the (donor, receptor) pairs is available here.

Synthetic Corpus
Alignment CBHS SGHS CBNS SGNS
None [6.0 GB] [5.9 GB] [5.9 GB] [5.8 GB]
Incremental Training [6.0 GB] [5.9 GB] [6.1 GB] [6.0 GB]
Books Corpus
Alignment CBHS SGHS CBNS SGNS
None     [4.6 GB] [5.0 GB]
Incremental Training [5.0 GB] [5.0 GB] [4.9 GB] [5.0 GB]

The embeddings for the Twitter dataset (Section 5.4) with incrementally trained SGNS are available here: [3.1 GB]

The embedding models are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. If you use these models in your scientific work, please reference the companion paper.

Detection Lists

We provide the full detection lists of SCAF for the Books and Twitter corpus here.