Sudden Semantic Shifts in Swedish NATO discourse

Brian Bonafilia, Bastiaan Bruinsma, Denitsa Saynova, Moa Johansson

Abstract
In this paper, we investigate a type of semantic shift that occurs when a sudden event radically changes public opinion on a topic. Looking at Sweden’s decision to apply for NATO membership in 2022, we use word embeddings to study how the associations users on Twitter have regarding NATO evolve. We identify several changes that we successfully validate against real-world events. However, the low engagement of the public with the issue often made it challenging to distinguish true signals from noise. We thus find that domain knowledge and data selection are of prime importance when using word embeddings to study semantic shifts.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-srw.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Vishakh Padmakumar, Gisela Vallejo, Yao Fu
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
184–193
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-srw.28
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-srw.28
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Brian Bonafilia, Bastiaan Bruinsma, Denitsa Saynova, and Moa Johansson. 2023. Sudden Semantic Shifts in Swedish NATO discourse. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 184–193, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sudden Semantic Shifts in Swedish NATO discourse (Bonafilia et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.acl-srw.28.pdf
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