New paper: “Analyzing differences between discursive communities using dialectograms”
In the paper “Analyzing differences between discursive communities using dialectograms,” current and former DISTRACT researchers Thyge Enggaard, August Lohse, Morten Axel Pedersen and Sune Lehmann introduce a new way to map how words are used differently in different communities: dialectograms.
They take a step towards leveraging the richness of the full embedding space, by using word embeddings to map out how words are used differently. Specifically, they describe the construction of dialectograms, an unsupervised way to visually explore the characteristic ways in which each community uses a focal word. Based on these dialectograms, they provide a new measure of the degree to which words are used differently that overcomes the tendency for existing measures to pick out low-frequency or polysemous words.
They apply their methods to explore the discourses of two US political subreddits and show how their methods identify stark affective polarisation of politicians and political entities, differences in the assessment of proper political action as well as disagreement about whether certain issues require political intervention at all.
Follow this link to read the full Scientific Reports paper.