Language Evolution On The Go Gideon Zenz, Nina Tahmasebi and Thomas Risse L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany, {zenz, tahmasebi, risse}@L3S.de Abstract. Knowing about the evolution of a term can significantly de- crease time needed for searching for information. It can also aid in quickly getting a broader overview, which is essential when one is on the move. In this paper we present a solution for providing language evolution knowl- edge “on the go”. We present a mobile interface for easy access and visualization as well as an overview of how this evolution was found. Keywords: language evolution, mobile applications, ambient media 1 Introduction In the age of ambient media, the user demands constant support for her needs. Mobile and smart devices provide excellent facilities for giving immersive, loca- tion based support for activities. In this paper we present a solution for providing language evolution knowledge “on the go”. Languages are evolving over time triggered by various factors including new insights, political and cultural trends, new legal requirements, and high-impact events [2]. Imagine traveling through St. Petersburg. This city exhibits a par- ticularly interesting language development, as it was founded in 1703 as “Sankt Piter Burh” and soon after renamed to “Saint Petersburg”. From 1914-1924 it was named “Petrograd” and afterwards “Leningrad”. In 1991 it changed back to “Saint Petersburg” also simply referred to as “Petersburg”. The typical user will not be aware of this complex development and therefore might be puzzled by observing different names when sightseeing. Using our terminology evolution application, such connections can be more easily and conveniently determined than using standard search on e.g. Google or Wikipedia. To our knowledge only one previous work has been published in the area of terminology evolution[1]. Using language from the past, the aim here is to find good query reformulations for search engines of concurrent language. Our approach advances on this by using word senses to find similar terms rather than pure co-occurrence information. Furthermore our approach does not restrict the user to specifying a timeframe for the evolution. Due to the limited previous work no investigations on the interaction with user for this special application have been conducted. The contribution of this paper is the development of an initial mobile inter- face for easy access and visualization of the language evolution we detected in a