Computational approaches to lexical semantic change: Visualization systems and novel applications

The purpose of this chapter is to survey visualization and user interface solutions for understanding lexical semantic change as well as to survey a number of applications of techniques developed in computational analysis of lexical semantic change. We first overview approaches aiming to develop systems that support understanding semantic change in an interactive and visual way. It is generally accepted that computational techniques developed for analyzing and uncovering semantic change are beneficial to linguists, historians, sociologists, and practitioners in numerous related fields, especially within the humanities. However, quite a few non-professional users are equally interested in the histories of words. Developing interactive, visual, engaging, and easy-to-understand systems can help them to acquire relevant knowledge.

Second, we believe that other fields could benefit from the research outcomes of
computational approaches to lexical semantic change. In general, properly
representing the meaning of terms used in the past should be important for a range of
natural language processing, information retrieval and other tasks that operate on
old texts. In the latter part of the chapter, we then focus on current and potential
applications related to computer and information science with the underlying
question: “How can modeling semantic change benefit wider downstream applications
in these disciplines?”