Semantic Shift Detection in Vatican Publications: a Case Study from Leo XIII to Francis

In the recent years, word embedding models are being proposed to effectively detect language change and semantic shift in diachronic corpora. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of different word embedding approaches by considering a case-study based on an Italian diachronic corpus of Vatican publications of Popes from Leo XIII to Francis (1898-2020). Four different approaches are considered, characterized by the adoption of different embedding models each one trained over the publications of a specific pope. The paper aims to explore whether and how word embedding techniques are successful in detecting semantic shifts over the language used by popes .