# Matching Meaning at Scale: Evaluating Semantic Search for 18th-Century Intellectual History through the Case of Locke

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09236 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09236/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

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- [Analysing Lexical Semantic Change with Contextualised Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14118/) (2020)
- [ABNIRML: Analyzing the Behavior of Neural IR Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00696/) (2020)
- [Reception Reader: Exploring Text Reuse in Early Modern British Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04084/) (2023)
- [Resolving Lexical Bias in Model Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10411/) (2024)
- [Loci Similes: A Benchmark for Extracting Intertextualities in Latin Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07533/) (2026)
- [Semantic Search as Extractive Paraphrase Span Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04886/) (2021)
- [News Deja Vu: Connecting Past and Present with Semantic Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15593/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While digitized corpora have transformed the study of intellectual transmission, current methods rely heavily on lexical text reuse detection, capturing verbatim quotations but fundamentally missing paraphrases and complex implicit engagement. This paper evaluates semantic search in 18th-century intellectual history through the reception of John Locke's foundational work. Using expert annotation grounded in a semantic taxonomy, we examine whether an off-the-shelf semantic search pipeline can surface meaning-level correspondences overlooked by lexical methods. Our results demonstrate that semantic search retrieves substantially more implicit receptions than lexical baselines. However, linguistic diagnostics also reveal a "lexical gatekeeping" effect, where retrieval remains partially constrained by surface vocabulary overlap. These findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of semantic retrieval for analyzing the circulation of ideas in large historical corpora. The data is available at https://github.com/COMHIS/locke-sim-data.