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In recent years, Lexical semantic change detection (LSCD) has become a central task of NLP. Because most studies in LSCD only consider the semantic change of words in isolation, in this paper, we propose a new direction for the analysis of semantic shifts: traveling word pairs. First, we introduce shift correlation to find pairs of words that semantically shift together in a similar fashion. Second, we propose word relation shift to analyze how the relationship between two words has changed over time. As a test case, we investigate the word privacy (and related words identified by a pre-existing dictionary), as an example of a word that has shifted semantics historically and remains vibrantly explored as a concept in contemporary humanistic discourse. We report that the term privacy in comparison shows relatively little change initially – with correlation analysis revealing more about how key terms surrounding privacy have shifted in tandem, and explore nuanced changes through word pair analysis, suggesting a shift toward concreteness in particular.
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