Michael Boyden


2023

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Anchors in Embedding Space: A Simple Concept Tracking Approach to Support Conceptual History Research
Jetske Adams | Martha Larson | Jaap Verheul | Michael Boyden
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

We introduce a simple concept tracking approach to support conceptual history research. Building on the existing practices of conceptual historians, we use dictionaries to identify “anchors”, which represent primary dimensions of meaning of a concept. Then, we create a plot showing how a key concept has evolved over time in a historical corpus in relation to these dimensions. We demonstrate the approach by plotting the change of several key concepts in the COHA corpus.