Roksana Goworek

Roksana Goworek, Haim Dubossarsky

Lexical semantic change detection (LSCD) increasingly relies on contextualised language model embeddings, yet most approaches still quantify change using a small set of semantic change metrics, primarily Average Pairwise Distance (APD) and cosine distance over word prototypes (PRT). We introduce Average Minimum Distance (AMD) and Symmetric Average Minimum Distance (SAMD), new measures that quantify semantic change via local correspondence between word usages across time periods. Across multiple languages, encoder models, and representation spaces, we show that AMD often provides more robust performance, particularly under dimensionality reduction and with non-specialised encoders, while SAMD excels with specialised encoders. We suggest that LSCD may benefit from considering alternative semantic change metrics beyond APD and PRT, with AMD offering a robust option for contextualised embedding-based analysis.

Roksana Goworek, Harpal Karlcut, Muhammad Shezad et al.

This paper addresses the critical need for high-quality evaluation datasets in low-resource languages to advance cross-lingual transfer. While cross-lingual transfer offers a key strategy for leveraging multilingual pretraining to expand language technologies to understudied and typologically diverse languages, its effectiveness is dependent on quality and suitable benchmarks. We release new sense-annotated datasets of sentences containing polysemous words, spanning ten low-resource languages across diverse language families and scripts. To facilitate dataset creation, the paper presents a demonstrably beneficial semi-automatic annotation method. The utility of the datasets is demonstrated through Word-in-Context (WiC) formatted experiments that evaluate transfer on these low-resource languages. Results highlight the importance of targeted dataset creation and evaluation for effective polysemy disambiguation in low-resource settings and transfer studies. The released datasets and code aim to support further research into fair, robust, and truly multilingual NLP.

Roksana Goworek, Haim Dubossarsky

Cross-lingual transfer is central to modern NLP, enabling models to perform tasks in languages different from those they were trained on. A common assumption is that training on more languages improves zero-shot transfer. We test this on sense-aware tasks-polysemy and lexical semantic change-and find that multilinguality is not necessary for effective transfer. Our large-scale analysis across 28 languages reveals that other factors, such as differences in pretraining and fine-tuning data and evaluation artifacts, better explain the perceived benefits of multilinguality. We also release fine-tuned models and provide empirical baselines to support future research. While focused on two sense-aware tasks, our findings offer broader insights into cross-lingual transfer, especially for low-resource languages.