{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/characterizing-linguistic-shifts-in-croatian","title":"Characterizing Linguistic Shifts in Croatian News via Diachronic Word Embeddings","arxiv_id":"2506.13569","date":"2025-06-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["David Dukić","Ana Barić","Marko Čuljak","Josip Jukić","Martin Tutek"],"abstract":"Measuring how semantics of words change over time improves our understanding of how cultures and perspectives change. Diachronic word embeddings help us quantify this shift, although previous studies leveraged substantial temporally annotated corpora. In this work, we use a corpus of 9.5 million Croatian news articles spanning the past 25 years and quantify semantic change using skip-gram word embeddings trained on five-year periods. Our analysis finds that word embeddings capture linguistic shifts of terms pertaining to major topics in this timespan (COVID-19, Croatia joining the European Union, technological advancements). We also find evidence that embeddings from post-2020 encode increased positivity in sentiment analysis tasks, contrasting studies reporting a decline in mental health over the same period.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13569v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13569v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"characterizing-linguistic-shifts-in-croatian","repo_url":"https://github.com/dd1497/cro-diachronic-emb","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"articles","task_name":"Articles"},{"task_slug":"diachronic-word-embeddings","task_name":"Diachronic Word Embeddings"},{"task_slug":"sentiment-analysis","task_name":"Sentiment Analysis"},{"task_slug":"word-embeddings","task_name":"Word Embeddings"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}