# Short-Term Meaning Shift: A Distributional Exploration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.03169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03169/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

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- [Time Masking for Temporal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06366/) (2021)
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- [A Survey on Contextualised Semantic Shift Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01666/) (2023)
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- [TempoWiC: An Evaluation Benchmark for Detecting Meaning Shift in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07216/) (2022)
- [Improving Temporal Generalization of Pre-trained Language Models with Lexical Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17127/) (2022)
- [BiTimeBERT: Extending Pre-Trained Language Representations with Bi-Temporal Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13032/) (2022)
- [Statistically significant detection of semantic shifts using contextual word embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03776/) (2021)
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- [Do Not Fire the Linguist: Grammatical Profiles Help Language Models Detect Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05717/) (2022)
- [textitSwap and Predict -- Predicting the Semantic Changes in Words across Corpora by Context Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10397/) (2023)
- [A Semantic Distance Metric Learning approach for Lexical Semantic Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00226/) (2024)
- [Towards Effective Time-Aware Language Representation: Exploring Enhanced Temporal Understanding in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01863/) (2024)
- [Tweet Insights: A Visualization Platform to Extract Temporal Insights from Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02142/) (2023)
- [The challenges of temporal alignment on Twitter during crises](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08535/) (2021)
- [CHEW: A Dataset of CHanging Events in Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19116/) (2024)
- [Identifying Emerging Concepts in Large Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21315/) (2025)
- [Improving Interpretability of Lexical Semantic Change with Neurobiological Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09760/) (2026)
- [We went to look for meaning and all we got were these lousy representations: aspects of meaning representation for computational semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04949/) (2021)
- [Diachronic Text Mining Investigation of Therapeutic Candidates for COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13971/) (2021)
- [WIKITIDE: A Wikipedia-Based Timestamped Definition Pairs Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03582/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first exploration of meaning shift over short periods of time in online communities using distributional representations. We create a small annotated dataset and use it to assess the performance of a standard model for meaning shift detection on short-term meaning shift. We find that the model has problems distinguishing meaning shift from referential phenomena, and propose a measure of contextual variability to remedy this.