Simple, Interpretable and Stable Method for Detecting Words with Usage Change across Corpora

Hila Gonen, Ganesh Jawahar, Djamé Seddah, Yoav Goldberg


Abstract
The problem of comparing two bodies of text and searching for words that differ in their usage between them arises often in digital humanities and computational social science. This is commonly approached by training word embeddings on each corpus, aligning the vector spaces, and looking for words whose cosine distance in the aligned space is large. However, these methods often require extensive filtering of the vocabulary to perform well, and - as we show in this work - result in unstable, and hence less reliable, results. We propose an alternative approach that does not use vector space alignment, and instead considers the neighbors of each word. The method is simple, interpretable and stable. We demonstrate its effectiveness in 9 different setups, considering different corpus splitting criteria (age, gender and profession of tweet authors, time of tweet) and different languages (English, French and Hebrew).
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.51
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
538–555
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.51
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.51
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hila Gonen, Ganesh Jawahar, Djamé Seddah, and Yoav Goldberg. 2020. Simple, Interpretable and Stable Method for Detecting Words with Usage Change across Corpora. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 538–555, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Simple, Interpretable and Stable Method for Detecting Words with Usage Change across Corpora (Gonen et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.51.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929089
Code
 gonenhila/usage_change