{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/tracking-semantic-shifts-in-german-court","title":"Tracking Semantic Shifts in German Court Decisions with Diachronic Word Embeddings","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2022-12-01","proceeding":"Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022 12","authors":["Daniel Braun"],"abstract":"Language and its usage change over time. While legal language is arguably more stable than everyday language, it is still subject to change. Sometimes it changes gradually and slowly, sometimes almost instantaneously, for example through legislative changes. This paper presents an application of diachronic word embeddings to track changes in the usage of language by German courts triggered by changing legislation, based on a corpus of more than 200,000 documents. The results show the swift and lasting effect that changes in legislation can have on the usage of language by courts and suggest that using time-restricted word embedding models could be beneficial for downstream NLP tasks.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.19/","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.19.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"tracking-semantic-shifts-in-german-court","repo_url":"https://github.com/DaBr01/diachronic-word-embeddings-from-german-court-decisions","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diachronic-word-embeddings","task_name":"Diachronic Word Embeddings"},{"task_slug":"word-embeddings","task_name":"Word Embeddings"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}