Abstract
The paper focuses on diachronic evaluation of semantic changes of harm-related concepts in psychology. More specifically, we investigate a hypothesis that certain concepts such as “addiction”, “bullying”, “harassment”, “prejudice”, and “trauma” became broader during the last four decades. We evaluate semantic changes using two models: an LSA-based model from Sagi et al. (2009) and a diachronic adaptation of word2vec from Hamilton et al. (2016), that are trained on a large corpus of journal abstracts covering the period of 1980– 2019. Several concepts showed evidence of broadening. “Addiction” moved from physiological dependency on a substance to include psychological dependency on gaming and the Internet. Similarly, “harassment” and “trauma” shifted towards more psychological meanings. On the other hand, “bullying” has transformed into a more victim-related concept and expanded to new areas such as workplaces.- Anthology ID:
- W19-4704
- 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:
- 29–34
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W19-4704
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W19-4704
- Cite (ACL):
- Ekaterina Vylomova, Sean Murphy, and Nicholas Haslam. 2019. Evaluation of Semantic Change of Harm-Related Concepts in Psychology. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 29–34, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Evaluation of Semantic Change of Harm-Related Concepts in Psychology (Vylomova et al., LChange 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp22-frontmatter/W19-4704.pdf