116 research outputs found
Analysing Lexical Semantic Change with Contextualised Word Representations
This paper presents the first unsupervised approach to lexical semantic
change that makes use of contextualised word representations. We propose a
novel method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain
representations of word usages, clusters these representations into usage
types, and measures change along time with three proposed metrics. We create a
new evaluation dataset and show that the model representations and the detected
semantic shifts are positively correlated with human judgements. Our extensive
qualitative analysis demonstrates that our method captures a variety of
synchronic and diachronic linguistic phenomena. We expect our work to inspire
further research in this direction.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2020
- …