JeSemE: A Website for Exploring Diachronic Changes in Word Meaning and Emotion

TL;DR

JeSemE is an interactive website that visualizes how word meanings and emotions have evolved over time using large diachronic corpora, aiding humanities scholars in data-driven text interpretation.

Contribution

It introduces a significantly extended version of JeSemE, combining distributional semantics with emotion modeling for diachronic linguistic analysis.

Findings

Enables exploration of word meaning changes over time

Integrates emotion analysis with semantic shifts

Provides a user-friendly tool for humanities research

Abstract

We here introduce a substantially extended version of JeSemE, an interactive website for visually exploring computationally derived time-variant information on word meanings and lexical emotions assembled from five large diachronic text corpora. JeSemE is designed for scholars in the (digital) humanities as an alternative to consulting manually compiled, printed dictionaries for such information (if available at all). This tool uniquely combines state-of-the-art distributional semantics with a nuanced model of human emotions, two information streams we deem beneficial for a data-driven interpretation of texts in the humanities.