The diffusion of scientific terms – tracing individuals’ influence in the history of science for English

Yuri Bizzoni, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Katrin Menzel, Elke Teich

Abstract
Tracing the influence of individuals or groups in social networks is an increasingly popular task in sociolinguistic studies. While methods to determine someone’s influence in shortterm contexts (e.g., social media, on-line political debates) are widespread, influence in longterm contexts is less investigated and may be harder to capture. We study the diffusion of scientific terms in an English diachronic scientific corpus, applying Hawkes Processes to capture the role of individual scientists as “influencers” or “influencees” in the diffusion of new concepts. Our findings on two major scientific discoveries in chemistry and astronomy of the 18th century reveal that modelling both the introduction and diffusion of scientific terms in a historical corpus as Hawkes Processes allows detecting patterns of influence between authors on a long-term scale.
Anthology ID:
2021.latechclfl-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (online)
Editors:
Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCHCLfL
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
120–127
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.latechclfl-1.14
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.latechclfl-1.14
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuri Bizzoni, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Katrin Menzel, and Elke Teich. 2021. The diffusion of scientific terms – tracing individuals’ influence in the history of science for English. In Proceedings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 120–127, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The diffusion of scientific terms – tracing individuals’ influence in the history of science for English (Bizzoni et al., LaTeCHCLfL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2021.latechclfl-1.14.pdf
PDF Search