An Embedded Diachronic Sense Change Model with a Case Study from Ancient Greek

Word meanings change over time, and word senses evolve, emerge or die out in the process. For ancient languages, where the corpora are often small, sparse and noisy, modelling such changes accurately proves challenging, and quantifying uncertainty in sense-change estimates consequently becomes important. GASC and DiSC are existing generative models that have been used to analyse sense change for target words from an ancient Greek text corpus, using unsupervised learning without the help of any pre-training. These models represent the senses of a given target word such as "kosmos" (meaning decoration, order or world) as distributions over context words, and sense prevalence as a distribution over senses. The models are fitted using MCMC methods to measure temporal changes in these representations. In this paper, we introduce EDiSC, an embedded version of DiSC, which combines word embeddings with DiSC to provide superior model performance. We show empirically that EDiSC offers improved predictive accuracy, ground-truth recovery and uncertainty quantification, as well as better sampling efficiency and scalability properties with MCMC methods. We also discuss the challenges of fitting these models.