Abstract:The majority of contemporary computational methods for lexical semantic change (LSC) detection are based on neural embedding distributional representations. Although these models perform well on LSC benchmarks, their results are often difficult to interpret. We explore an alternative approach that relies solely on frame semantics. We show that this method is effective for detecting semantic change and can even outperform many distributional semantic models. Finally, we present a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of its predictions, demonstrating that they are both plausible and highly interpretable
Abstract:Most modern computational approaches to lexical semantic change detection (LSC) rely on embedding-based distributional word representations with neural networks. Despite the strong performance on LSC benchmarks, they are often opaque. We investigate an alternative method which relies purely on dependency co-occurrence patterns of words. We demonstrate that it is effective for semantic change detection and even outperforms a number of distributional semantic models. We provide an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of the predictions, showing that they are plausible and interpretable.