ACL 2025short0 citations
Meaning Variation and Data Quality in the Corpus of Founding Era American English
Abstract
Legal scholars are increasingly using corpus based methods for assessing historical meaning. Among work focused on the so-called founding era (mid to late 18th century), the majority of such studies use the Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA) and rely on methods such as word counting and manual coding. Here, we demonstrate what can be inferred about meaning change and variation using more advanced NLP methods, focusing on terms in the U.S. Constitution. We also carry out a data quality assessment of COFEA, pointing out issues with OCR quality and metadata, compare diachronic change to synchronic variation, and discuss limitations when using NLP methods for studying historical meaning.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{card-2025-meaning,
title = "Meaning Variation and Data Quality in the Corpus of Founding Era {A}merican {E}nglish",
author = "Card, Dallas",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-short.66/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-short.66",
pages = "841--856",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-252-7"
}