The Corpora They Are a-Changing: a Case Study in Italian Newspapers

Pierpaolo Basile, Annalina Caputo, Tommaso Caselli, Pierluigi Cassotti, Rossella Varvara

Abstract: The use of automatic methods for the study of lexical semantic change (LSC) has led to the creation of evaluation benchmarks. Benchmark datasets, however, are intimately tied to the corpus used for their creation questioning their reliability as well as the robustness of automatic methods. This contribution investigates these aspects showing the impact of unforeseen social and cultural dimensions. We also identify a set of additional issues (OCR quality, named entities) that impact the performance of the automatic methods, especially when used to discover LSC.