Abstract
The industrialization process associated with the so-called Industrial Revolution in 19th-century Great Britain was a time of profound changes, including in the English lexicon. An important yet understudied phenomenon is the semantic shift in the lexicon of mechanisation. In this paper we present the first large-scale analysis of terms related to mechanization over the course of the 19th-century in English. We draw on a corpus of historical British newspapers comprising 4.6 billion tokens and train historical word embedding models. We test existing semantic change detection techniques and analyse the results in light of previous historical linguistic scholarship.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.nlp4dh-1.12
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Taipei, Taiwan
- Venue:
- NLP4DH
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 85–95
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlp4dh-1.12
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Nilo Pedrazzini and Barbara McGillivray. 2022. Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities, pages 85–95, Taipei, Taiwan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers (Pedrazzini & McGillivray, NLP4DH 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2022.nlp4dh-1.12.pdf