An Annotation Protocol for Diachronic Evaluation of Semantic Drift in Disability Sources

Annotating terms referring to aspects of disability in historical texts is crucial for understanding how societies in different periods conceptualized and treated disability. Such annotations help modern readers grasp the evolving language, cultural attitudes, and social structures surrounding disability, shedding light on both marginalization and inclusion throughout history. This is important as evolving societal attitudes can influence the perpetuation of harmful language that reinforces stereotypes and discrimination. However, this task presents significant challenges. Terminology often reflects outdated, offensive, or ambiguous concepts that require sensitive interpretation. Meaning of terms may have shifted over time, making it difficult to align historical terms with contemporary understandings of disability. Additionally, contextual nuances and the lack of standardized language in historical records demand careful scholarly judgment to avoid anachronism or misrepresentation.In this paper we introduce an annotation protocol for analysing and describing semantic shifts in the discourse on disabilities in historical texts, reporting on how our protocol's design evolved to address these specific challenges and on issues around annotators' agreement. For designing the annotation protocol for measuring the semantic change in the disability domain, we selected texts for annotation from Gale’s History of Disabilities: Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century(https://www.gale.com/intl/c/history-of-disabilities-disabilities-in-society-seventeenth-to-twentieth-century).Nitisha Jain, Chiara Di Bonaventura, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Barbara McGillivray. 2025. An Annotation Protocol for Diachronic Evaluation of Semantic Drift in Disability Sources. In <i>Proceedings of the 19th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW 2025)</i>. Association for Computational Linguistics.