Abstract
Language and its usage change over time. While legal language is arguably more stable than everyday language, it is still subject to change. Sometimes it changes gradually and slowly, sometimes almost instantaneously, for example through legislative changes. This paper presents an application of diachronic word embeddings to track changes in the usage of language by German courts triggered by changing legislation, based on a corpus of more than 200,000 documents. The results show the swift and lasting effect that changes in legislation can have on the usage of language by courts and suggest that using time-restricted word embedding models could be beneficial for downstream NLP tasks.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.nllp-1.19
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
- Editors:
- Nikolaos Aletras, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Cătălina Goanță, Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro
- Venue:
- NLLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 218–227
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.19
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.nllp-1.19
- Cite (ACL):
- Daniel Braun. 2022. Tracking Semantic Shifts in German Court Decisions with Diachronic Word Embeddings. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022, pages 218–227, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Tracking Semantic Shifts in German Court Decisions with Diachronic Word Embeddings (Braun, NLLP 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-bitext-workshop/2022.nllp-1.19.pdf