Measuring and Modeling Language Change

Jacob Eisenstein


Abstract
This tutorial is designed to help researchers answer the following sorts of questions: - Are people happier on the weekend? - What was 1861’s word of the year? - Are Democrats and Republicans more different than ever? - When did “gay” stop meaning “happy”? - Are gender stereotypes getting weaker, stronger, or just different? - Who is a linguistic leader? - How can we get internet users to be more polite and objective? Such questions are fundamental to the social sciences and humanities, and scholars in these disciplines are increasingly turning to computational techniques for answers. Meanwhile, the ACL community is increasingly engaged with data that varies across time, and with the social insights that can be offered by analyzing temporal patterns and trends. The purpose of this tutorial is to facilitate this convergence in two main ways: 1. By synthesizing recent computational techniques for handling and modeling temporal data, such as dynamic word embeddings, the tutorial will provide a starting point for future computational research. It will also identify useful tools for social scientists and digital humanities scholars. 2. The tutorial will provide an overview of techniques and datasets from the quantitative social sciences and the digital humanities, which are not well-known in the computational linguistics community. These techniques include vector autoregressive models, multiple comparisons corrections for hypothesis testing, and causal inference. Datasets include historical newspaper archives and corpora of contemporary political speech.
Anthology ID:
N19-5003
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorials
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Anoop Sarkar, Michael Strube
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9–14
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-5003
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-5003
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jacob Eisenstein. 2019. Measuring and Modeling Language Change. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorials, pages 9–14, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Measuring and Modeling Language Change (Eisenstein, NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-5003.pdf
Presentation:
 N19-5003.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N19-5003.mp4