SynFlow: A Multidimensional Diachronic Semantic Analysis Toolkit

arXiv (Cornell University)

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. Diachronic corpus research instead examines interpretable dimensions such as syntactic behaviour, morphology, and constructional patterns, but typically through separate analytical workflows. We present SynFlow, an open-source toolkit for multidimensional diachronic analysis of linguistic usage. SynFlow converts linguistic observations into period-specific distributions and applies a shared workflow across dependency-based co-occurrences, morphological features, constructional configurations, and externally derived representations such as Frame Semantics. It supports different distance measures, together with value-level decomposition, statistical testing, and incremental clustering of lexical fillers. We demonstrate SynFlow through a qualitative case study of the German adjective viral, showing how a single semantic development is reflected across syntactic, lexical, constructional, and morphological dimensions. We further report previously published results on SemEval-2020 Task 1 to situate the performance of these representations relative to existing lexical semantic change detection systems.

Authors 5

1. Bach Phan-Tat

   KU Leuven

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Linguistics , KU Leuven

2. Kris Heylen Aachen Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal

   Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal · KU Leuven

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Linguistics , KU Leuven

   Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal

3. Dirk Geeraerts

   KU Leuven

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Linguistics , KU Leuven

4. Stefano De Pascale

   Vrije Universiteit Brussel · KU Leuven

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Linguistics , KU Leuven

   Vrije Universiteit Brussel

5. Dirk Speelman

   KU Leuven

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Linguistics , KU Leuven