# The challenges of temporal alignment on Twitter during crises

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08535/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Mind the Gap: Assessing Temporal Generalization in Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01951/) (2021)
- [Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09096/) (2016)
- [Diachronic word embeddings and semantic shifts: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03537/) (2018)
- [Statistically Significant Detection of Linguistic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.3315/) (2014)
- [Dynamic Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08359/) (2017)
- [HumAID: Human-Annotated Disaster Incidents Data from Twitter with Deep Learning Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03090/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Contextual Embeddings for Detecting Diachronic Semantic Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01072/) (2019)
- [Short-Term Meaning Shift: A Distributional Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03169/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12684/) (2020)
- [Back to the Future -- Sequential Alignment of Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03464/) (2019)

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

- [NEO-BENCH: Evaluating Robustness of Large Language Models with Neologisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12261/) (2024)
- [KoNeoBench: A Curated Evaluation Dataset for LLM Understanding of Korean Neologisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19916/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language use changes over time, and this impacts the effectiveness of NLP systems. This phenomenon is even more prevalent in social media data during crisis events where meaning and frequency of word usage may change over the course of days. Contextual language models fail to adapt temporally, emphasizing the need for temporal adaptation in models which need to be deployed over an extended period of time. While existing approaches consider data spanning large periods of time (from years to decades), shorter time spans are critical for crisis data. We quantify temporal degradation for this scenario and propose methods to cope with performance loss by leveraging techniques from domain adaptation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to explore effects of rapid language change driven by adversarial adaptations, particularly during natural and human-induced disasters. Through extensive experimentation on diverse crisis datasets, we analyze under what conditions our approaches outperform strong baselines while highlighting the current limitations of temporal adaptation methods in scenarios where access to unlabeled data is scarce.