Historical Ink: Semantic Shift Detection for 19th Century Spanish

TL;DR

This study develops a computational pipeline using fine-tuned BERT models to detect semantic shifts in 19th-century Spanish, revealing linguistic and cultural evolution in Latin American and general Spanish texts.

Contribution

It introduces a customizable SSD pipeline tailored for historical Spanish texts, leveraging modern NLP models to analyze semantic change over time.

Findings

Effective detection of semantic shifts in 19th-century Spanish.

Insights into cultural and societal changes reflected in language.

Demonstrates the utility of fine-tuned BERT models for historical linguistics.

Abstract

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.