Historical Ink: Semantic Shift Detection for 19th Century Spanish
This work addresses the challenge of understanding linguistic evolution for historians and computational linguists, but it is incremental as it applies existing SSD methods to a new historical dataset.
This paper tackled the problem of detecting semantic shifts in 19th-century Spanish texts, particularly Latin American Spanish, by developing a customizable pipeline using fine-tuned BERT-like models, resulting in insights into cultural and societal changes reflected in language evolution.
This paper explores the evolution of word meanings in 19th-century Spanish texts, with an emphasis on Latin American Spanish, using computational linguistics techniques. It addresses the Semantic Shift Detection (SSD) task, which is crucial for understanding linguistic evolution, particularly in historical contexts. The study focuses on analyzing a set of Spanish target words. To achieve this, a 19th-century Spanish corpus is constructed, and a customizable pipeline for SSD tasks is developed. This pipeline helps find the senses of a word and measure their semantic change between two corpora using fine-tuned BERT-like models with old Spanish texts for both Latin American and general Spanish cases. The results provide valuable insights into the cultural and societal shifts reflected in language changes over time.