Wang, William Yang, Mayfield, Elijah, Naidu, Suresh and Dittmar, Jeremiah 
ORCID: 0000-0002-3930-4496
(2012)
Historical analysis of legal opinions with a sparse mixed-effects latent variable model.
.
Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, USA.
Abstract
We propose a latent variable model to enhance historical analysis of large corpora. This work extends prior work in topic modelling by incorporating metadata, and the interactions between the components in metadata, in a general way. To test this, we collect a corpus of slavery-related United States property law judgements sampled from the years 1730 to 1866. We study the language use in these legal cases, with a special focus on shifts I opinions on controversial topics across different regions. Because this is a longitudinal data set, we are also interested in understanding how these opinions change over the course of decades. We show that the joint learning scheme of our sparse mixed-effects model improves on other state-of-the-art generative and discriminative models on the region and time period identification tasks. Experiments show that our sparse mixed-effects model is more accurate quantitatively and qualitatively interesting, and that these improvements are robust across different parameter settings.
| Item Type: | Monograph (Working Paper) |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://aclweb.org/ |
| Additional Information: | © 2012 Association for Computational Linguistics |
| Divisions: | Economics |
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Oct 2013 13:17 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Oct 2024 04:03 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/53577 |
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