Tracing semantic change with Latent Semantic Analysis
Eyal Sagi, Stefan Kaufmann, Brady Clark · 2011
Abstract: Research in historical semantics relies on the examination, selec-tion, and interpretation of texts from corpora. Changes in meaning are tracked through the collection and careful inspection of examples that span decades and centuries. This process is inextricably tied to the researcher‟s expertise and familiarity with the corpus. Consequently, the results tend to be difficult to quantify and put on an objective footing, and “big-picture” information about statistical trends and changes other than the specific ones under investigation are likely to be discarded. In this paper we present a method that uses Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer, Foltz & Laham, 1998) to automatically track and identify semantic changes across a corpus. This method can take the entire corpus into account when tracing changes in the use of words and phrases, thus potentially allowing researchers to better account for the larger context in which these changes occurred, while at the same time considerably reducing the amount of work required. Moreover, because this measure relies on readily observable co-occurrence data, it affords the study of semantic change a measure of objectivity that was previously difficult to attain. In this paper we describe our method and demonstrate its potential by applying it to several well-known examples of semantic change in the history of the English language.