# Unsupervised Embedding-based Detection of Lexical Semantic Changes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.07979 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07979/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07538/) (2021)
- [Effects of Pre- and Post-Processing on type-based Embeddings in Lexical Semantic Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09368/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes EmbLexChange, a system introduced by the "Life-Language" team for SemEval-2020 Task 1, on unsupervised detection of lexical-semantic changes. EmbLexChange is defined as the divergence between the embedding based profiles of word w (calculated with respect to a set of reference words) in the source and the target domains (source and target domains can be simply two time frames t1 and t2). The underlying assumption is that the lexical-semantic change of word w would affect its co-occurring words and subsequently alters the neighborhoods in the embedding spaces. We show that using a resampling framework for the selection of reference words, we can reliably detect lexical-semantic changes in English, German, Swedish, and Latin. EmbLexChange achieved second place in the binary detection of semantic changes in the SemEval-2020.