Sudden Semantic Shifts in Swedish NATO Discourse
Paper in proceeding, 2023

In this paper, we investigate a type of semantic shift that occurs when a sudden event radically changes public opinion on a topic. Looking at Sweden's decision to apply for NATO membership in 2022, we use word embeddings to study how the associations users on Twitter have regarding NATO evolve. We identify several changes that we successfully validate against real-world events. However, the low engagement of the public with the issue often made it challenging to distinguish true signals from noise. We thus find that domain knowledge and data selection are of prime importance when using word embeddings to study semantic shifts.

Author

Brian Bonafilia

Student at Chalmers

Sebastianus Cornelis Jacobus Bruinsma

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Data Science and AI

Denitsa Saynova

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Data Science and AI

Moa Johansson

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Data Science and AI

Association for Computational Linguistics . Annual Meeting Conference Proceedings

0736-587X (ISSN)

Vol. 4 184-193
9781959429692 (ISBN)

61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL-SRW 2023
Toronto, Canada,

Subject Categories

General Language Studies and Linguistics

Information Science

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Latest update

4/19/2024