Challenging distributional models with a conceptual network of philosophical terms

Yvette Oortwijn, Jelke Bloem, Pia Sommerauer, Francois Meyer, Wei Zhou, Antske Fokkens


Abstract
Computational linguistic research on language change through distributional semantic (DS) models has inspired researchers from fields such as philosophy and literary studies, who use these methods for the exploration and comparison of comparatively small datasets traditionally analyzed by close reading. Research on methods for small data is still in early stages and it is not clear which methods achieve the best results. We investigate the possibilities and limitations of using distributional semantic models for analyzing philosophical data by means of a realistic use-case. We provide a ground truth for evaluation created by philosophy experts and a blueprint for using DS models in a sound methodological setup. We compare three methods for creating specialized models from small datasets. Though the models do not perform well enough to directly support philosophers yet, we find that models designed for small data yield promising directions for future work.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.199
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2511–2522
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.199
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.199
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yvette Oortwijn, Jelke Bloem, Pia Sommerauer, Francois Meyer, Wei Zhou, and Antske Fokkens. 2021. Challenging distributional models with a conceptual network of philosophical terms. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 2511–2522, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Challenging distributional models with a conceptual network of philosophical terms (Oortwijn et al., NAACL 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2021.naacl-main.199.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2021.naacl-main.199.mp4
Code
 yoortwijn/challenging_dms