Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers
Name
2022.nlp4dh-1.12.pdf
Description
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938.6 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (CRC64NVME)
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Resource type
Conference paper (published)
Creator (person)
Pedrazzini, Nilo
McGillivray, Barbara
Date published
2022
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.
Contributor (organisation)
Living with Machines
Project(s)
Living with Machines
Funder
| Funder name | Awards |
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) | AH/S01179X/1 |
Event title
2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Official URL
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