Towards Tracking Semantic Change by Visual Analytics

This paper presents a new approach to detecting and tracking changes in word meaning by visually modeling and representing diachronic development in word contexts. Previous studies have shown that computational models are capable of clustering and disambiguating senses, a more recent trend investigates whether changes in word meaning can be tracked by automatic methods. The aim of our study is to offer a new instrument for investigating the diachronic development of word senses in a way that allows for a better understanding of the nature of semantic change in general. For this purpose we combine techniques From the fi eld or Visual Analytics with unsupervised methods from Natural Language Processing, allowing for an interactive visual exploration of semantic change.