Diachronic word embeddings and semantic shifts: a survey

Understand

Recent years have witnessed a surge of publications aimed at tracing temporal changes in lexical semantics using distributional methods, particularly prediction-based word embedding models.

• However, this vein of research lacks the cohesion, common terminology and shared practices of more established areas of natural language processing.
• In this paper, we survey the current state of academic research related to diachronic word embeddings and semantic shifts detection.
• We start with discussing the notion of semantic shifts, and then continue with an overview of the existing methods for tracing such time-related shifts with word embedding models.