  Our languages are in constant flux driven by external factors such as
cultural, societal and technological changes, as well as by only partially
understood internal motivations. Words acquire new meanings and lose old
senses, new words are coined or borrowed from other languages and obsolete
words slide into obscurity. Understanding the characteristics of shifts in the
meaning and in the use of words is useful for those who work with the content
of historical texts, the interested general public, but also in and of itself.
The findings from automatic lexical semantic change detection, and the models
of diachronic conceptual change are currently being incorporated in approaches
for measuring document across-time similarity, information retrieval from
long-term document archives, the design of OCR algorithms, and so on. In recent
years we have seen a surge in interest in the academic community in
computational methods and tools supporting inquiry into diachronic conceptual
change and lexical replacement. This article is an extract of a survey of
recent computational techniques to tackle lexical semantic change currently
under review. In this article we focus on diachronic conceptual change as an
extension of semantic change.
