LanguageChange documentation

LanguageChange is a Python toolkit for exploring lexical semantic change across corpora and time. It bundles data loaders, embedding pipelines, alignment strategies, and evaluation utilities so you can go from raw corpora to change scores and visual analyses in a single workflow. More specifically, the library provides:

• Ready-to-use benchmarks (SemEval 2020 Task 1, DWUG) plus helpers for your own corpora.

• Static and contextualised representation pipelines (count, PPMI, SVD, transformer-based) with caching.

• Alignment and comparison utilities (e.g. Orthogonal Procrustes) and standard change metrics such as PRT and APD.

• Plotting helpers for DWUG graphs and embeddings to inspect model behaviour visually.

To get started check out our Tutorial: using the lexical semantic change pipeline, which shows how to use the package to analyze the semantic change of the word “kvinna” (Swedish for “woman”) over more than 100 years.

For more details on how to use the library, check our reference API:

Contents:

• languagechange package
  • Subpackages
  • Submodules
  • languagechange.benchmark module
  • languagechange.cache module
  • languagechange.corpora module
  • languagechange.evaluation module
  • languagechange.resource_manager module
  • languagechange.search module
  • languagechange.usages module
  • languagechange.utils module
  • Module contents
• Tutorial: using the lexical semantic change pipeline
  • Loading and converting the corpora
  • Searching for usages of “kvinna”
  • Encode usages into embeddings
  • Clustering embeddings into word senses
  • Measure lexical semantic change with PJSD
  • Plot word sense clusters across time

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page

Source code

The source code for this project is available on GitHub: https://github.com/ChangeIsKey/languagechange/.

Credits

This project is maintained by the ChangeIsKey team with support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant M21-0021). The library is under active development, but íf it supports your research, please cite it as:

@misc{languagechange,

title = {LanguageChange: A Python library for studying semantic change}, author = {{Change is Key!}}, year = {n.d.}

}