Natural Language Processing

The Archaeology of Legal Definitions of Speech uses natural language processing to chart changes in the legal definition of speech and to place this language in its cultural and technological contexts. Drawing on a large corpus of Supreme Court decisions dealing with the First Amendment, the Archaeology identifies the terminology associated with speech in different historical periods, highlighting discontinuities in the way the law defines and delimits speech and drawing attention to the specific meanings of the concept in the past. It also seeks to place these different meanings in a...