Analysing word meaning over time by exploiting temporal Random Indexing

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to the construction of WordSpaces which takes into account temporal information. The proposed method is able to build a geometrical space considering several pe- riods of time. This methodology enables the analysis of the time evolution of the meaning of a word. Exploiting this ap- proach, we build a framework, called Tem- poral Random Indexing (TRI) that pro- vides all the necessary tools for building WordSpaces and performing such linguis- tic analysis. We propose some examples of usage of our tool by analysing word meanings in two corpora: a collection of Italian books and English scientific papers about computational linguistics