# Historical Ink: Semantic Shift Detection for 19th Century Spanish

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12852/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Analysing Lexical Semantic Change with Contextualised Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14118/) (2020)
- [Spanish Pre-trained BERT Model and Evaluation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02976/) (2023)
- [Cultural Shift or Linguistic Drift? Comparing Two Computational Measures of Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02821/) (2016)
- [Diachronic Usage Relatedness (DURel): A Framework for the Annotation of Lexical Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06517/) (2018)
- [DWUG: A large Resource of Diachronic Word Usage Graphs in Four Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08540/) (2021)
- [Capturing Evolution in Word Usage: Just Add More Clusters?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06629/) (2020)
- [A Systematic Comparison of Contextualized Word Embeddings for Lexical Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12011/) (2024)
- [AXOLOTL'24 Shared Task on Multilingual Explainable Semantic Change Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04079/) (2024)
- [Historical Ink: 19th Century Latin American Spanish Newspaper Corpus with LLM OCR Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12838/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Historical Ink: Exploring Large Language Models for Irony Detection in 19th-Century Spanish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22585/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.