Abstract
Language and its usage change over time. While legal language is arguably more stable than everyday language, it is still subject to change. Sometimes it changes gradually and slowly, sometimes almost instantaneously, for example through legislative changes. This paper presents an application of diachronic word embeddings to track changes in the usage of language by German courts triggered by changing legislation, based on a corpus of more than 200,000 documents. The results show the swift and lasting effect that changes in legislation can have on the usage of language by courts and suggest that using time-restricted word embedding models could be beneficial for downstream NLP tasks.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022 |
Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
Pages | 218-227 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2022 |
Event | Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop, NLLP 2022 - Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Duration: 8 Dec 2022 → 8 Dec 2022 |
Workshop
Workshop | Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop, NLLP 2022 |
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Abbreviated title | NLLP Workshop 2022 |
Country/Territory | United Arab Emirates |
City | Abu Dhabi |
Period | 8/12/22 → 8/12/22 |