Abstract

This testset consists of 23 terms which have experienced word sense change during the past centuries. The main changes for each term were found using Wikipedia, dictionary.com and the Oxford English Dictionary. We consider major changes in usage as well as changes to sense. In cases where multiple (fine-grained) senses were available, we opted to accept the widest sense. E.g. for the term rock we consider a music sense without any distinction between different types of rock music, because our dataset is unlikely to have fine-grained sense differentiations. If a clear time point cannot be pinpointed, we choose the earliest possible. For comparison purposes we also chose a set of 11 terms that have experienced minimal change during the investigated period, i.e., stable terms.