Studying the Evolution of Greek Words via Word Embeddings

Vasileios Barzokas, Eirini Papagiannopoulou, Grigorios Tsoumakas (2020), Studying the Evolution of Greek Words via Word Embeddings, 11th Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence

diachronic word embeddings, semantic shifts, k nearest neighbours, Greek language

The meanings of words change over time, reflecting changes in language and society (political, economic or cultural). This study focuses on the more recent form of modern Greek, i.e. Demotic, also known as Dimotiki, aiming to trace semantic shifts of Greek words between consecutive time periods. We develop a systematic framework that gathers free online Greek digitized literature books and analyzes them using natural language processing tools to learn representations of human language. Then, we conduct an experimental analysis to evaluate the quality of our trained models as well as their ability to detect semantic shifts. We present representative results of actual semantic shifts in Greek words in the period 1980 to 2020.