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

Andrey Kutuzov, Mario Giulianelli


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2020.semeval-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona (online)
Editors:
Aurelie Herbelot, Xiaodan Zhu, Alexis Palmer, Nathan Schneider, Jonathan May, Ekaterina Shutova
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
International Committee for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
126–134
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.14
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.semeval-1.14
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrey Kutuzov and Mario Giulianelli. 2020. UiO-UvA at SemEval-2020 Task 1: Contextualised Embeddings for Lexical Semantic Change Detection. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 126–134, Barcelona (online). International Committee for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UiO-UvA at SemEval-2020 Task 1: Contextualised Embeddings for Lexical Semantic Change Detection (Kutuzov & Giulianelli, SemEval 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.14.pdf
Code
 akutuzov/semeval2020