Semantic Change and Emerging Tropes In a Large Corpus of New High German Poetry
This work addresses the scarcity of large diachronic corpora for semantic change analysis in poetry, benefiting researchers in computational linguistics and literary studies, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The authors tackled the problem of analyzing semantic change in poetry by creating a large diachronic corpus of 75k German poems with over 11 million tokens, and they found that semantic change points, such as the rise of tropes like 'love is magic', occurred notably during the German Romantic period, while also providing evidence that the law of linear semantic change applies to poetry.
Due to its semantic succinctness and novelty of expression, poetry is a great test bed for semantic change analysis. However, so far there is a scarcity of large diachronic corpora. Here, we provide a large corpus of German poetry which consists of about 75k poems with more than 11 million tokens, with poems ranging from the 16th to early 20th century. We then track semantic change in this corpus by investigating the rise of tropes (`love is magic') over time and detecting change points of meaning, which we find to occur particularly within the German Romantic period. Additionally, through self-similarity, we reconstruct literary periods and find evidence that the law of linear semantic change also applies to poetry.