@inproceedings{iacob-uban-2026-computational,
    title = "A Computational Analysis of the Emergence of Therapy-speak in Social Media",
    author = "Iacob, Alina  and
      Uban, Ana Sabina",
    editor = "Tahmasebi, Nina  and
      Cassotti, Pierluigi  and
      Montariol, Syrielle  and
      Kutuzov, Andrey  and
      Huebscher, Netta  and
      Spaziani, Elena  and
      Baes, Naomi",
    booktitle = "The Proceedings for the 6th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Change ({LC}hange{'}26)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.lchange-1.12/",
    pages = "131--146",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-362-3",
    abstract = "The present article investigates semantic change in psychology-related concepts, in scientific and social media texts comparatively. We assess patterns of change over 15 years (2010-2025) and compare word usage in a corpus of Psychology journals abstracts and Reddit comments, testing whether specialized communities on social media align with psychology experts. We analyze semantic breadth, semantic displacement and neighbours similarity evolutions, and in addition include in our experiments contextual embeddings alongside static Word2Vec embeddings. Our results reveal diverse patterns of semantic change across the examined concepts and confirm that many terms are used differently on social media compared to specialized literature. Furthermore, Reddit communities focused on psychology discussions occupy an intermediate position, adopting a more objective stance than general-domain threads while remaining distinct from specialized literature."
}