CoToHiLi at LSCDiscovery: the Role of Linguistic Features in Predicting Semantic Change

Abstract

This paper presents the contributions of the CoToHiLi team for the LSCDiscovery shared task on semantic change in the Spanish language. We participated in both tasks (graded discovery and binary change, including sense gain and sense loss) and proposed models based on word embedding distances combined with hand-crafted linguistic features, including polysemy, number of neological synonyms, and relation to cognates in English. We find that using linguistically informed features combined using weights assigned manually by experts leads to promising results.