Temporal Word Analogies: Identifying Lexical Replacement with Diachronic Word Embeddings

Terrence Szymanski
2017 Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)  
This paper introduces the concept of temporal word analogies: pairs of words which occupy the same semantic space at different points in time. One well-known property of word embeddings is that they are able to effectively model traditional word analogies ("word w 1 is to word w 2 as word w 3 is to word w 4 ") through vector addition. Here, I show that temporal word analogies ("word w 1 at time t α is like word w 2 at time t β ") can effectively be modeled with diachronic word embeddings,
more » ... ed that the independent embedding spaces from each time period are appropriately transformed into a common vector space. When applied to a diachronic corpus of news articles, this method is able to identify temporal word analogies such as "Ronald Reagan in 1987 is like Bill Clinton in 1997", or "Walkman in 1987 is like iPod in 2007".
doi:10.18653/v1/p17-2071 dblp:conf/acl/Szymanski17 fatcat:7rws35owgzgdhpswpzm7rewk7q