Abstract
Word choice is dependent on the cultural context of writers and their subjects. Different words are used to describe similar actions, objects, and features based on factors such as class, race, gender, geography and political affinity. Exploratory techniques based on locating and counting words may, therefore, lead to conclusions that reinforce culturally inflected boundaries. We offer a new method, the DualNeighbors algorithm, for linking thematically similar documents both within and across discursive and linguistic barriers to reveal cross-cultural connections. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations of this technique are shown as applied to two cultural datasets of interest to researchers across the humanities and social sciences. An open-source implementation of the DualNeighbors algorithm is provided to assist in its application.- Anthology ID:
- W18-4506
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Santa Fe, New Mexico
- Editors:
- Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Feldman, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
- Venue:
- LaTeCH
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 50–59
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W18-4506
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton. 2018. Cross-Discourse and Multilingual Exploration of Textual Corpora with the DualNeighbors Algorithm. In Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 50–59, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Cross-Discourse and Multilingual Exploration of Textual Corpora with the DualNeighbors Algorithm (Arnold & Tilton, LaTeCH 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/W18-4506.pdf