Dynamic Generative model for Diachronic Sense Emergence Detection

AbstractAs time passes words can acquire meanings they did not previously have, such as the ‘twitter post’ usage of ‘tweet’. We address how this can be detected from time-stamped raw text. We propose a generative model with senses dependent on times and context words dependent on senses but otherwise eternal, and a Gibbs sampler for estimation. We obtain promising parameter estimates for positive (resp. negative) cases of known sense emergence (resp non-emergence) and adapt the ‘pseudo-word’ technique (Schutze, 1992) to give a novel further evaluation via ‘pseudo-neologisms’. The question of ground-truth is also addressed and a technique proposed to locate an emergence date for evaluation purposes.