XL-LEXEME: WiC Pretrained Model for Cross-Lingual LEXical sEMantic changE

The recent introduction of large-scale datasets for the WiC (Word in Context) task enables the creation of more reliable and meaningful contextualized word embeddings.However, most of the approaches to the WiC task use cross-encoders, which prevent the possibility of deriving comparable word embeddings.In this work, we introduce XL-LEXEME, a Lexical Semantic Change Detection model.XL-LEXEME extends SBERT, highlighting the target word in the sentence.We evaluate XL-LEXEME on the multilingual benchmarks for SemEval-2020 Task 1 - Lexical Semantic Change (LSC) Detection and the RuShiftEval shared task involving five languages: English, German, Swedish, Latin, and Russian.XL-LEXEME outperforms the state-of-the-art in English, German and Swedish with statistically significant differences from the baseline results and obtains state-of-the-art performance in the RuShiftEval shared task.