Panta rei: Tracking semantic change with distributional semantics in ancient Greek

Abstract

We present a method to explore semantic change as a function of varia-tion in distributional semantic spaces. In this paper we apply this approach to au-tomatically identify the areas of semantic change in the lexicon of Ancient Greek between the pre-Christian and Christian era. Distributional Semantic Models are used to identify meaningful clusters and patterns of semantic shift within a set of target words, defined through a purely data-driven approach. The results empha-size the role played by the diffusion of Christianity and by technical languages in determining semantic change in An-cient Greek and show the potentialities of distributional models in diachronic se-mantics.