Related papers: Locating the Leading Edge of Cultural Change
Measuring similarity is a basic task in information retrieval, and now often a building-block for more complex arguments about cultural change. But do measures of textual similarity and distance really correspond to evidence about cultural…
Diachronic word embeddings -- vector representations of words over time -- offer remarkable insights into the evolution of language and provide a tool for quantifying sociocultural change from text documents. Prior work has used such…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
Matching for causal inference is a well-studied problem, but standard methods fail when the units to match are text documents: the high-dimensional and rich nature of the data renders exact matching infeasible, causes propensity scores to…
We demonstrate the utility of a new methodological tool, neural-network word embedding models, for large-scale text analysis, revealing how these models produce richer insights into cultural associations and categories than possible with…
Using the frequency of keywords is a classic approach in the formal analysis of text, but has the drawback of glossing over the relationality of word meanings. Word embedding models overcome this problem by constructing a standardized and…
We propose a new similarity measure between texts which, contrary to the current state-of-the-art approaches, takes a global view of the texts to be compared. We have implemented a tool to compute our textual distance and conducted…
Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this paper I theorize the ways in which word…
Textual representations based on pre-trained language models are key, especially in few-shot learning scenarios. What makes a representation good for text classification? Is it due to the geometric properties of the space or because it is…
Does adding a theorem to a paper affect its chance of acceptance? Does labeling a post with the author's gender affect the post popularity? This paper develops a method to estimate such causal effects from observational text data, adjusting…
Analyzing the pattern of semantic variation in long real-world texts such as books or transcripts is interesting from the stylistic, cognitive, and linguistic perspectives. It is also useful for applications such as text segmentation,…
New text as data techniques offer a great promise: the ability to inductively discover measures that are useful for testing social science theories of interest from large collections of text. We introduce a conceptual framework for making…
Factual consistency is one of important summary evaluation dimensions, especially as summary generation becomes more fluent and coherent. The ESTIME measure, recently proposed specifically for factual consistency, achieves high correlations…
Research on the 'cultural alignment' of Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged in response to growing interest in understanding representation across diverse stakeholders. Current approaches to evaluating cultural alignment through…
Fairness is a principal social value that can be observed in civilisations around the world. A manifestation of this is in social agreements, often described in texts, such as contracts. Yet, despite the prevalence of such, a fairness…
When dealing with document similarity many methods exist today, like cosine similarity. More complex methods are also available based on the semantic analysis of textual information, which are computationally expensive and rarely used in…
The inclusion of semantic information in any similarity measures improves the efficiency of the similarity measure and provides human interpretable results for further analysis. The similarity calculation method that focuses on features…
Word similarity has many applications to social science and cultural analytics tasks like measuring meaning change over time and making sense of contested terms. Yet traditional similarity methods based on cosine similarity between word…
Automatic readability assessment plays a key role in ensuring effective and accessible written communication. Despite significant progress, the field is hindered by inconsistent definitions of readability and measurements that rely on…
To extract essential information from complex data, computer scientists have been developing machine learning models that learn low-dimensional representation mode. From such advances in machine learning research, not only computer…