Identifying Emerging Concepts in Large Corpora

Sibo Ma, Julian Nyarko


Abstract
We introduce a new method to identify emerging concepts in large text corpora. By analyzing changes in the heatmaps of the underlying embedding space, we are able to detect these concepts with high accuracy shortly after they originate, in turn outperforming common alternatives. We further demonstrate the utility of our approach by analyzing speeches in the U.S. Senate from 1941 to 2015. Our results suggest that the minority party is more active in introducing new concepts into the Senate discourse. We also identify specific concepts that closely correlate with the Senators’ racial, ethnic, and gender identities. An implementation of our method is publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.344
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6760–6778
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.344/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sibo Ma and Julian Nyarko. 2025. Identifying Emerging Concepts in Large Corpora. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6760–6778, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Emerging Concepts in Large Corpora (Ma & Nyarko, NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.344.pdf