DWUG: A large Resource of Diachronic Word Usage Graphs in Four Languages

Dominik Schlechtweg, Nina Tahmasebi, Simon Hengchen, Haim Dubossarsky, Barbara McGillivray

Abstract: Word meaning is notoriously difficult to capture, both synchronically and diachronically. In this paper, we describe the creation of the largest resource of graded contextualized, diachronic word meaning annotation in four different languages, based on 100,000 human semantic proximity judgments. We thoroughly describe the multi-round incremental annotation process, the choice for a clustering algorithm to group usages into senses, and possible - diachronic and synchronic - uses for this dataset.