English

Evaluation of Word Embeddings for the Social Sciences

Computation and Language 2023-02-14 v1

Abstract

Word embeddings are an essential instrument in many NLP tasks. Most available resources are trained on general language from Web corpora or Wikipedia dumps. However, word embeddings for domain-specific language are rare, in particular for the social science domain. Therefore, in this work, we describe the creation and evaluation of word embedding models based on 37,604 open-access social science research papers. In the evaluation, we compare domain-specific and general language models for (i) language coverage, (ii) diversity, and (iii) semantic relationships. We found that the created domain-specific model, even with a relatively small vocabulary size, covers a large part of social science concepts, their neighborhoods are diverse in comparison to more general models. Across all relation types, we found a more extensive coverage of semantic relationships.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.06174,
  title  = {Evaluation of Word Embeddings for the Social Sciences},
  author = {Ricardo Schiffers and Dagmar Kern and Daniel Hienert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.06174},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:38:29.100Z