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WoVis: Interactive Visualization of Word Embeddings for Semantic Change in Historical and Dialectal Language Resources

Paper · 2026 · Filip Miletić, Maximilian Henkel, Rene Cutura et al.

Summary

Studies of semantic variation and change often compare word embeddings trained on historical and dialectal corpora. Linguists and lexicographers without programming skills find these analyses hard to use, so valuable resources stay underused. The authors present WoVis, an open-source interactive tool that compares several word2vec models side by side along two axes, such as language variety and time period. It projects vectors into two dimensions with PaCMAP, a method chosen because it keeps both local and global structure of the space. Users can start from an overview of the whole vocabulary and then examine individual words through nearest neighbours and neighbourhood density. They can also compare pairs of words to spot changes in which sense dominates, and inspect external word-level properties, including how often a word occurs and its ratings in affective norm datasets. A built-in module trains new models from raw corpora. The demonstrations cover West vs. East German newspapers and scientific British vs. general-domain American English. The tool works with any language, which lowers the barrier to exploratory, interpretable research on semantic change.

Key points

  • German case study: Spiegel (West) vs. Berliner Zeitung (East) for 1950–1989, each split into four decade subcorpora. Models are skip-gram word2vec trained from scratch with window 5, 200 dimensions, min. frequency 2, learning rate 0.03 and 15 epochs. Hyperparameters were tuned on WordSim280.
  • English case study: Royal Society Corpus (RSC, 1800–1996) vs. clean COHA (CCOHA, 1810–2009), each split into four subcorpora. This setup reuses previously published CBOW models (Zaberer, 2025).
  • External lexical features: frequency is computed per subcorpus. German norms cover abstractness, imageability, valence and arousal (Köper & Schulte im Walde, 2016). English norms cover abstractness (Brysbaert et al., 2014) and valence, arousal and dominance (Mohammad, 2018). The feature module is extensible.
  • Inputs: Gensim KeyedVectors models, 2D coordinate NumPy files and an optional CSV of features. File names combine a corpus tag and a time tag (e.g., BZ_50), which control colour, marker shape and shade in the plots.
  • Availability: code and models are released at github.com/maxeljaxel/wovis.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of StuttgartStuttgart · Germany91 works · 46,376 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2,869 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Historical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Filip Miletić, Maximilian Henkel, Rene Cutura, Sophie Sadler, Quynh Quang Ngo, Michael Sedlmair and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2026. WoVis: Interactive Visualization of Word Embeddings for Semantic Change in Historical and Dialectal Language Resources. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP –- A Resource Perspective.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3jzkx999kfxq

@inproceedings{miletic2026wovis,
  title = {{WoVis: Interactive Visualization of Word Embeddings for Semantic Change in Historical and Dialectal Language Resources}},
  author = {Filip Miletić, Maximilian Henkel, Rene Cutura, Sophie Sadler, Quynh Quang Ngo, Michael Sedlmair and Sabine Schulte im Walde},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP –- A Resource Perspective},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3jzkx999kfxq},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3jzkx999kfxq}
}

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