A State-of-the-Art of Semantic Change Computation

This paper reviews state-of-the-art of one emerging field in computational linguistics — semantic change computation, proposing a framework that summarizes the literature by identifying and expounding five essential components in the field: diachronic corpus, diachronic word sense characterization, change modelling, evaluation data and data visualization. Despite the potential of the field, the review shows that current studies are mainly focused on testifying hypotheses proposed in theoretical linguistics and that several core issues remain to be solved: the need for diachronic corpora of languages other than English, the need for comprehensive evaluation data for evaluation, the comparison and construction of approaches to diachronic word sense characterization and change modelling, and further exploration of data visualization techniques for hypothesis