Papers › UiO-UvA at SemEval-2020 Task 1: Contextualised Embeddings for Lexical Semantic Change Detection

UiO-UvA at SemEval-2020 Task 1: Contextualised Embeddings for Lexical Semantic Change Detection

30 Apr 2020SEMEVAL 2020arXiv:2005.00050archive 2025-07-28

Andrey Kutuzov, Mario Giulianelli

We apply contextualised word embeddings to lexical semantic change detection in the SemEval-2020 Shared Task 1. This paper focuses on Subtask 2, ranking words by the degree of their semantic drift over time. We analyse the performance of two contextualising architectures (BERT and ELMo) and three change detection algorithms. We find that the most effective algorithms rely on the cosine similarity between averaged token embeddings and the pairwise distances between token embeddings. They outperform strong baselines by a large margin (in the post-evaluation phase, we have the best Subtask 2 submission for SemEval-2020 Task 1), but interestingly, the choice of a particular algorithm depends on the distribution of gold scores in the test set.

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akutuzov/semeval2020 officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchGPL-3.0 report

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Change DetectionWord Embeddings

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