ReFRAME or Remain: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection with Frame Semantics
Computation and Language
2026-05-05 v3
Abstract
The majority of contemporary computational methods for lexical semantic change (LSC) detection are based on neural embedding distributional representations. Although these models perform well on LSC benchmarks, their results are often difficult to interpret. We explore an alternative approach that relies solely on frame semantics. We show that this method is effective for detecting semantic change and can even outperform many distributional semantic models. Finally, we present a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of its predictions, demonstrating that they are both plausible and highly interpretable
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.04514,
title = {ReFRAME or Remain: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection with Frame Semantics},
author = {Bach Phan-Tat and Kris Heylen and Dirk Geeraerts and Stefano De Pascale and Dirk Speelman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04514},
year = {2026}
}