Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers

TY - CHAP

T1 - Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers

AU - Pedrazzini, Nilo

AU - McGillivray, Barbara

PY - 2022/11/22

Y1 - 2022/11/22

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

UR - https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlp4dh-1.12.pdf

M3 - Conference paper

SP - 85

BT - Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities

PB - Association for Computational Linguistics

ER -