The Corpora They Are a-Changing: a Case Study in Italian Newspapers

Pierpaolo Basile, Annalina Caputo, Tommaso Caselli, Pierluigi Cassotti, Rossella Varvara


Abstract
The use of automatic methods for the study of lexical semantic change (LSC) has led to the creation of evaluation benchmarks. Benchmark datasets, however, are intimately tied to the corpus used for their creation questioning their reliability as well as the robustness of automatic methods. This contribution investigates these aspects showing the impact of unforeseen social and cultural dimensions. We also identify a set of additional issues (OCR quality, named entities) that impact the performance of the automatic methods, especially when used to discover LSC.
Anthology ID:
2021.lchange-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen, Syrielle Montariol, Haim Dubossarsky
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14–20
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.lchange-1.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.lchange-1.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pierpaolo Basile, Annalina Caputo, Tommaso Caselli, Pierluigi Cassotti, and Rossella Varvara. 2021. The Corpora They Are a-Changing: a Case Study in Italian Newspapers. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021, pages 14–20, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Corpora They Are a-Changing: a Case Study in Italian Newspapers (Basile et al., LChange 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.lchange-1.3.pdf