Tracing Antisemitic Language Through Diachronic Embedding Projections: France 1789-1914

Rocco Tripodi, Massimo Warglien, Simon Levis Sullam, Deborah Paci

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Abstract
We investigate some aspects of the history of antisemitism in France, one of the cradles of modern antisemitism, using diachronic word embeddings. We constructed a large corpus of French books and periodicals issues that contain a keyword related to Jews and performed a diachronic word embedding over the 1789-1914 period. We studied the changes over time in the semantic spaces of 4 target words and performed embedding projections over 6 streams of antisemitic discourse. This allowed us to track the evolution of antisemitic bias in the religious, economic, socio-politic, racial, ethic and conspiratorial domains. Projections show a trend of growing antisemitism, especially in the years starting in the mid-80s and culminating in the Dreyfus affair. Our analysis also allows us to highlight the peculiar adverse bias towards Judaism in the broader context of other religions.
Anthology ID:
W19-4715
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
115–125
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4715
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4715
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rocco Tripodi, Massimo Warglien, Simon Levis Sullam, and Deborah Paci. 2019. Tracing Antisemitic Language Through Diachronic Embedding Projections: France 1789-1914. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 115–125, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tracing Antisemitic Language Through Diachronic Embedding Projections: France 1789-1914 (Tripodi et al., LChange 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/W19-4715.pdf
Code
 roccotrip/antisem