Caveats of Measuring Semantic Change of Cognates and Borrowings using Multilingual Word Embeddings

Abstract

Cognates and borrowings carry different aspects of etymological evolution. In this work, we study semantic change of such items using multilingual word embeddings, both static and contextualised. We underline caveats identified while building and evaluating these embeddings. We release both said embeddings and a newly-built historical words lexicon, containing typed relations between words of varied Romance languages.