@inproceedings{Degaetano-Ortlieb2018b,
title = {Using relative entropy for detection and analysis of periods of diachronic linguistic change},
author = {Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Elke Teich},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/W18-4503},
year = {2018},
date = {2018},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature at COLING2018},
pages = {22-33},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Santa Fe, New Mexico},
abstract = {We present a data-driven approach to detect periods of linguistic change and the lexical and grammatical features contributing to change. We focus on the development of scientific English in the late modern period. Our approach is based on relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler Divergence) comparing temporally adjacent periods and sliding over the time line from past to present. Using a diachronic corpus of scientific publications of the Royal Society of London, we show how periods of change reflect the interplay between lexis and grammar, where periods of lexical expansion are typically followed by periods of grammatical consolidation resulting in a balance between expressivity and communicative efficiency. Our method is generic and can be applied to other data sets, languages and time ranges.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}