Using lemon to Model Lexical Semantic Shift in Diachronic Lexical Resources

In this paper we propose a model, called lemonDIA, for representing lexical semantic change using the lemon framework and based on the ontological notion of the perdurant. Namely we extend the notion of sense in lemon by adding a temporal dimension and then define a class of perdurant entities that represents a shift in meaning of a word and which contains different related senses. We start by discussing the general problem of semantic shift and the utility of being able to easily access and represent such information in diachronic lexical resources. We then describe our model and illustrate it with examples.