Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning of words is vital for interpreting texts coming from different cultures (regionalism or slang), domains (e.g., technical terms), or periods. In computer science, these words are relevant to computational linguistics algorithms such as translation, information retrieval, question answering, etc. Semantic changes can potentially impact the quality of the outcomes of these algorithms. Therefore, it is important to understand and characterize these changes formally. The study of this impact is a recent problem that has attracted the attention of the computational linguistics community. Several approaches propose methods to detect semantic changes with good precision, but more effort is needed to characterize how the meaning of words changes and to reason about how to reduce the impact of semantic change. This survey provides an understandable overview of existing approaches to the \textit{characterization of semantic changes} and also formally defines three classes of characterizations: if the meaning of a word becomes more general or narrow (change in dimension) if the word is used in a more pejorative or positive/ameliorated sense (change in orientation), and if there is a trend to use the word in a, for instance, metaphoric or metonymic context (change in relation). We summarized the main aspects of the selected publications in a table and discussed the needs and trends in the research activities on semantic change characterization.

翻译：活语言持续演化以融入人类社会的文化变迁。这种演化通过新词（新词汇）或词语的语义演变（现有词汇获得新含义）得以体现。理解词语含义对于解读来自不同文化（地域方言或俚语）、领域（如技术术语）或时期的文本至关重要。在计算机科学中，这些词语与计算语言学算法（如机器翻译、信息检索、问答系统等）密切相关。语义演变可能影响这些算法输出结果的质量。因此，正式地理解并刻画这些演变特征具有重要意义。针对该影响的研究是计算语言学领域近期关注的新兴课题。现有方法虽能较精准地检测语义演变，但需更多努力以刻画词义演变的具体模式，并探索如何降低语义演变的影响。本综述系统梳理了现有语义演变特征研究方法，并正式定义了三类特征刻画维度：词义泛化或特化（维度变化）、词义贬义化或褒义化（情感取向变化），以及词语是否倾向于在隐喻或转喻等语境中使用（关联性变化）。我们将所选文献的核心要素汇总于表格，并探讨了语义演变特征研究的需求与发展趋势。