Temporal Random Indexing: A System for Analysing Word Meaning over Time

Abstract

During the last decade the surge in available data spanning different epochs has inspired a new analysis of cultural, social, and linguistic phenomena from a temporal perspective. This paper describes a method that enables the analysis of the time evolution of the meaning of a word. We propose Temporal Random Indexing (TRI), a method for building WordSpaces that takes into account temporal information. We exploit this methodology in order to build geometrical spaces ofword meanings that consider several periods oftime. The TRI framework provides all the necessary tools to build WordSpaces over different time periods and perform such temporal linguistic analysis. We propose some examples ofusage ofour tool by analysing word meanings in two corpora: a collection ofItalian books and English scientific papers about computational linguistics. This analysis enables the detection of linguistic events that emerge in specific time intervals and that can be related to social or cultural phenomena.