Björn Rönnerstrand


2024

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Can political dogwhistles be predicted by distributional methods for analysis of lexical semantic change?
Max Boholm | Björn Rönnerstrand | Ellen Breitholtz | Robin Cooper | Elina Lindgren | Gregor Rettenegger | Asad Sayeed
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

2022

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Distributional properties of political dogwhistle representations in Swedish BERT
Niclas Hertzberg | Robin Cooper | Elina Lindgren | Björn Rönnerstrand | Gregor Rettenegger | Ellen Breitholtz | Asad Sayeed
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)

“Dogwhistles” are expressions intended by the speaker have two messages: a socially-unacceptable “in-group” message understood by a subset of listeners, and a benign message intended for the out-group. We take the result of a word-replacement survey of the Swedish population intended to reveal how dogwhistles are understood, and we show that the difficulty of annotating dogwhistles is reflected in the separability in the space of a sentence-transformer Swedish BERT trained on general data.