Semantic Change in the Language of UK Parliamentary Debates

Gavin Abercrombie, Riza Batista-Navarro


Abstract
We investigate changes in the meanings of words used in the UK Parliament across two different epochs. We use word embeddings to explore changes in the distribution of words of interest and uncover words that appear to have undergone semantic transformation in the intervening period, and explore different ways of obtaining target words for this purpose. We find that semantic changes are generally in line with those found in other corpora, and little evidence that parliamentary language is more static than general English. It also seems that words with senses that have been recorded in the dictionary as having fallen into disuse do not undergo semantic changes in this domain.
Anthology ID:
W19-4726
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
210–215
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4726
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4726
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gavin Abercrombie and Riza Batista-Navarro. 2019. Semantic Change in the Language of UK Parliamentary Debates. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 210–215, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Change in the Language of UK Parliamentary Debates (Abercrombie & Batista-Navarro, LChange 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4726.pdf