Papers › Historical Ink: Semantic Shift Detection for 19th Century Spanish

Historical Ink: Semantic Shift Detection for 19th Century Spanish

8 Jul 2024arXiv:2407.12852archive 2025-07-28

Tony Montes, Laura Manrique-Gómez, Rubén Manrique

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.

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Tasks

Masked Language ModelingSemantic Shift DetectionSemantic Similarity

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Spanish Corpus XIX

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Methods

1x1 ConvolutionConvolutionNon Maximum SuppressionSETSSD

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