Laurent Dubreuil

Disentangling language change: sparse autoencoders quantify the semantic evolution of indigeneity in French

This study presents a novel approach to analyzing historical language change, focusing on the evolving semantics of the French term “indigène(s)” (“indigenous”) between 1825 and 1950. While existing approaches to measuring semantic change with contextual word embeddings (CWE) rely primarily on simil…