Semantic Change in the Language of UK Parliamentary Debates

AbstractWe investigate changes in the meanings of words used in the UK Parliament across two different epochs. We use word embeddings to explore changes in the distribution of words of interest and uncover words that appear to have undergone semantic transformation in the intervening period, and explore different ways of obtaining target words for this purpose. We find that semantic changes are generally in line with those found in other corpora, and little evidence that parliamentary language is more static than general English. It also seems that words with senses that have been recorded in the dictionary as having fallen into disuse do not undergo semantic changes in this domain.