Measuring the Change in Semantic and Sentiment of Neologisms Against An Axis

Are today’s neologisms indicating that we are all a bunch of pessimists? New words are produced at the rapid rate of about 15 per day and distributed online. Some words last only a week contained to a small circle of friends while others find a permanent residence in the dictionary. But, as with the words that came before them, they are subject to the force of language evolution. We track a set of neologisms in their first few years of life to see how their semantics and their sentiment may have changed over time by embedding them in a 100-dimensional vector space and comparing their placement with respect to a word axis. We analyze the e↵ectiveness of this type of measurement neologism evolution, and find that specific axes provide a great tool to analyzing neologism sentiment and semantics, and also that neologisms seem more mobile in the vector space that common words.