Introducing traveling word pairs in historical semantic change: a case study of privacy words in 18th and 19th century English
- In recent years, Lexical semantic change detection (LSCD) has become a central task of NLP. Because most studies in LSCD only consider the semantic change of words in isolation, in this paper, we propose a new direction for the analysis of semantic shifts: traveling word pairs. First, we introduce shift correlation to find pairs of words that semantically shift together in a similar fashion. Second, we propose word relation shift to analyze how the relationship between two words has changed over time. As a test case, we investigate the word privacy (and related words identified by a pre-existing dictionary), as an example of a word that has shifted semantics historically and remains vibrantly explored as a concept in contemporary humanistic discourse. We report that the term privacy in comparison shows relatively little change initially – with correlation analysis revealing more about how key terms surrounding privacy have shifted in tandem, and explore nuanced changes through word pair analysis, suggesting a shift toward concreteness in particular.
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| Author: | Thora HagenORCiD, Erik KetzanORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-130895 |
| URL: | https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3558/paper5360.pdf |
| ISSN: | 1613-0073 |
| Parent Title (English): | Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023 (CHR 2023). Paris, France, December 6-8, 2023. |
| Series (Serial Number): | CEUR Workshop Proceedings (3558) |
| Publisher: | Sun SITE Central Europe |
| Place of publication: | Aachen |
| Editor: | Artjoms ŠeļaORCiDGND, Fotis JannidisORCiDGND, Iza RomanowskaORCiDGND |
| Document Type: | Conference Proceeding |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first Publication: | 2023 |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2025/04/01 |
| Publishing Institution: | Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) |
| Publicationstate: | Veröffentlichungsversion |
| Reviewstate: | Peer-Review |
| Tag: | Lexical semantic change detection (LSCD); NLP; computational semantics; language models; semantic change; semantic shifts; word relation shift |
| GND Keyword: | Bedeutungswandel; Computerlinguistik; Englisch; Fallstudie; Geschichte; Natürliche Sprache; Semantik; Sprache; Sprachwandel |
| First Page: | 461 |
| Last Page: | 474 |
| DDC classes: | 400 Sprache / 400 Sprache, Linguistik |
| Open Access?: | ja |
| Linguistics-Classification: | Computerlinguistik |
| Linguistics-Classification: | Semantik |
| Licence (English): |  Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International |