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International Conference on Discovery Science

DS 2018: Discovery Science pp 194–208Cite as

Exploiting the Web for Semantic Change Detection

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11198))

Abstract

Detecting significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words has gained more attention over the last few years. Linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where words’ meaning can change rapidly. In this work, we describe the construction of a large diachronic corpus that relies on the UK Web Archive and we propose a preliminary analysis of semantic change detection exploiting a particular technique called Temporal Random Indexing. Results of the evaluation are promising and give us important insights for further investigations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://jsoup.org/.

  2. 2.

    https://lucene.apache.org/core/7_3_1/core/index.html.

  3. 3.

    https://lucene.apache.org/core/.

  4. 4.

    V contains the terms that we want to analyse, typically, the most n frequent terms.

  5. 5.

    We did not highlight orange in the list because in this context it could refer to the fruit, in which case it would be related to the fruit sense of blackberry, or to the mobile phone company, in which case it would be related to the cellphone sense of blackberry.

  6. 6.

    As the earliest texts in the corpus date from 1996, we allowed for a one-year buffer between this date and the date of first usage according to the OED, under the assumption that a sense first recorded in the OED in 1995 could be recorded with sufficient evidence in our corpus at least one year later.

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Acknowledgments

This research was undertaken with the support of the Alan Turing Institute (EPSRC Grant Number EP/N510129/1). The access to the Oxford English Dictionary API was provided by Oxford University Press via a licence for non-commercial research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Pierpaolo Basile

  2. Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Barbara McGillivray

  3. The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK

    Barbara McGillivray

Authors
  1. Pierpaolo Basile
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  2. Barbara McGillivray
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pierpaolo Basile .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Goldsmiths University of London, London, UK

    Larisa Soldatova

  2. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Joaquin Vanschoren

  3. University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    George Papadopoulos

  4. Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Michelangelo Ceci

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Basile, P., McGillivray, B. (2018). Exploiting the Web for Semantic Change Detection. In: Soldatova, L., Vanschoren, J., Papadopoulos, G., Ceci, M. (eds) Discovery Science. DS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11198. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01771-2_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01771-2_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01770-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01771-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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