The study investigates whether contextual embeddings can detect meaning changes in scientific terminology beyond traditional frequency counts. Using Astrophysics and NLP corpora from 2010 to 2024, the authors extract candidate terms with KeyBERT, filter for significant frequency rises, and then evaluate semantic drift via multiple embedding‑based metrics. Results show that frequency methods slightly outperform embedding metrics in aligning with expert judgments, yet embedding‑only detections (e.g., "primordial black holes") reveal critical conceptual shifts missed by frequency alone, suggesting complementary value.
arXiv:2609.08609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tracking semantic change in low-resource languages across extensive historical timelines presents significant challenges due to data scarcity and t...
arXiv:2609.18697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Historians have reconstructed the twentieth-century transformation of general relativity and gravitation (GRG) at the field level and through individua...
arXiv:2608. 19472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Lexical semantic change (LSC) is commonly modelled through vector-space representations, but these approaches often provide limited insight into which aspects of usage are changing.
The BD-LSC dataset introduces a bi‑directional lexical semantic change benchmark that tracks sense gain, loss, and stability across three time periods, while the ST‑WSD dataset offers fine‑grained, instance‑level sense annotations for words that blend slang and standard usage. These resources enable systematic evaluation of diverse models—including unsupervised clustering, supervised learning, transformer‑based approaches, and large language models—on tasks such as exact sense matching and multi‑label accuracy. The evaluation shows that few‑shot GPT‑4o performs best overall, yet all systems struggle with rare slang senses, highlighting a key open challenge in the field.
arXiv:2605. 05103v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the \textbf{Concept Field} of a text corpus: a local drift field with pointwise uncertainty, estimated in sentence-embedding space from the deltas between consecutive sentences.
How does research evolve, and what substrate would let us forecast where it goes next? Scientific progress is not simply a uniform accumulation of facts: ideas extend prior methods, address known limitations, realize proposed future directions, and sometimes dispute earlier claims.
The article presents a technical manual for an open toolkit designed to measure how transformer language models individuate word meanings across different contexts. It introduces the concept of a "bridge form"—a single word that appears unchanged in multiple domains but with distinct senses—and outlines a full pipeline from specifying these forms to extracting layer-wise representations, computing silhouette-based separation metrics, and visualizing results. The manual details each design choice and its intended methodological safeguards, emphasizing that it serves as a methodological reference rather than reporting empirical findings.
arXiv:2606.22342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How does research evolve, and can we trace it at the level of individual claims? Scientific progress is not simply a uniform accumulation of facts....
The paper introduces Coupled Usage–Sense Processes (CUSP), a method that models lexical semantic change by coupling contextual distributions through latent usage components and using Markov composition to link adjacent time periods. CUSP quantifies change magnitude and timing, separates variation into component movement and internal reorganization, and attributes changes to specific transported component pairs. The approach is validated on synthetic data, English and German corpora, and a large corpus of US court opinions, providing detailed, text‑grounded insights into how word meanings evolve over time.
arXiv:2609.14770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalisations are common in scientific communication, even though they are semantically ambiguous. An automated method is needed to identify and ca...
The study analyzes 207,111 astronomy papers from 2015 to mid‑2026 to quantify how many contain language‑model‑generated vocabulary. Using a hierarchical Bayesian model calibrated on pre‑2020 unassisted papers and 392 papers that disclose model use, the authors estimate that in 2025 roughly 54% (±8% statistical, ±26% systematic) of papers show a language‑model trace, with the estimate remaining above 36% under various assumptions. Despite only 0.81% of 2025 papers explicitly declaring model assistance, the trace is pervasive, and the detectable signal is fading as authors adapt to the characteristic words. whyItMatters":"The findings reveal that language‑model assistance has become widespread in recent astronomy research, yet most authors do not disclose its use, highlighting a growing gap between actual practice and transparency in scholarly writing."
arXiv:2608. 16621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented and agentic question-answering systems increasingly re-derive the meaning of a corpus at query time.