Abstract
Studying conceptual change using embedding models has become increasingly popular in the Digital Humanities community while critical observations about them have received less attention. This paper investigates what the impact of known pitfalls can be on the conclusions drawn in a digital humanities study through the use case of “Racism”. In addition, we suggest an approach for modeling a complex concept in terms of words and relations representative of the conceptual system. Our results show that different models created from the same data yield different results, but also indicate that using different model architectures, comparing different corpora and comparing to control words and relations can help to identify which results are solid and which may be due to artefact. We propose guidelines to conduct similar studies, but also note that more work is needed to fully understand how we can distinguish artefacts from actual conceptual changes.- Anthology ID:
- W19-4728
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Florence, Italy
- Editors:
- Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu
- Venue:
- LChange
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 223–233
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/W19-4728/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W19-4728
- Cite (ACL):
- Pia Sommerauer and Antske Fokkens. 2019. Conceptual Change and Distributional Semantic Models: an Exploratory Study on Pitfalls and Possibilities. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 223–233, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Conceptual Change and Distributional Semantic Models: an Exploratory Study on Pitfalls and Possibilities (Sommerauer & Fokkens, LChange 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/W19-4728.pdf