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：活语言不断演变以整合人类社会文化变迁。这种演变通过新词产生或词语的**语义变化**（即现有词汇获得新含义）得以体现。理解词义对于解读源自不同文化（地域主义或俚语）、领域（如术语）或时期的文本至关重要。在计算机科学领域，这些词汇与翻译、信息检索、问答等计算语言学算法密切相关。语义变化可能影响这些算法输出结果的质量，因此，以形式化方式理解并表征这些变化具有重要意义。这一影响的研究是近期计算语言学领域引发关注的问题。现有多种方法能以较高精度检测语义变化，但对于如何表征词义变化机制以及减少语义变化影响的推理仍需进一步探索。本综述概述了现有**语义变化表征**方法，并正式定义了三种表征类型：词义泛化或窄化（维度变化）、词义贬义化或褒义化（倾向变化）、以及词汇在隐喻或转喻等语境中的使用趋势（关系变化）。我们以表格形式总结了所选文献的主要特征，并讨论了语义变化表征研究活动的需求与趋势。