Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers
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...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Conference item |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Association for Computational Linguistics
2022
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| Summary: | 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. |
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