# RuSemShift: a dataset of historical lexical semantic change in Russian

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06436/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [DWUG: A large Resource of Diachronic Word Usage Graphs in Four Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08540/) (2021)
- [Lexical Semantic Change Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03111/) (2021)
- [Three-part diachronic semantic change dataset for Russian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08294/) (2021)
- [LSCDiscovery: A shared task on semantic change discovery and detection in Spanish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06691/) (2022)
- [NorDiaChange: Diachronic Semantic Change Dataset for Norwegian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05123/) (2022)
- [RuDSI: graph-based word sense induction dataset for Russian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13750/) (2022)
- [MOLE: Metadata Extraction and Validation in Scientific Papers Using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19800/) (2025)
- [Effects of Pre- and Post-Processing on type-based Embeddings in Lexical Semantic Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09368/) (2021)
- [The LSCD Benchmark: a Testbed for Diachronic Word Meaning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00176/) (2024)
- [Tracking Semantic Change in Slovene: A Novel Dataset and Optimal Transport-Based Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16596/) (2024)
- [SiDiaC-v.2.0: Sinhala Diachronic Corpus Version 2.0](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10861/) (2026)
- [A Tale of Two Laws of Semantic Change: Predicting Synonym Changes with Distributional Semantic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19143/) (2023)
- [JuniperLiu at CoMeDi Shared Task: Models as Annotators in Lexical Semantics Disagreements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12147/) (2024)
- [FuocChuVIP123 at CoMeDi Shared Task: Disagreement Ranking with XLM-Roberta Sentence Embeddings and Deep Neural Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12336/) (2025)
- [XL-DURel: Finetuning Sentence Transformers for Ordinal Word-in-Context Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14578/) (2025)
- [Dynamics of Meaning: Towards the Evaluation of Diachronic Semantic Change in Sinhala](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08609/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present RuSemShift, a large-scale manually annotated test set for the task of semantic change modeling in Russian for two long-term time period pairs: from the pre-Soviet through the Soviet times and from the Soviet through the post-Soviet times. Target words were annotated by multiple crowd-source workers. The annotation process was organized following the DURel framework and was based on sentence contexts extracted from the Russian National Corpus. Additionally, we report the performance of several distributional approaches on RuSemShift, achieving promising results, which at the same time leave room for other researchers to improve.