Tag Archives: concepts

The Edge

LDNA at Digital Humanities Congress 2016, Sheffield

LDNA organised two panels at the 2016 Digital Humanities Congress (DHC; Sheffield, 8th-10th September. Both focused on text analytics, with the first adopting the theme ‘Between numbers and words’, and the second ‘Identifying complex meanings in historical texts’. Fraser reports:


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LDNA’s first year: Reflections from RA Seth Mehl

In wrapping up the first year of LDNA, I’ve taken a moment to consider some of the over-arching questions that have occupied much of my creative and critical faculties so far. What follows is a personal reflection on some issues that I’ve found especially exciting and engaging.

Semantics and concepts

The Linguistic DNA project sets out to identify ‘semantic and conceptual change’ in Early Modern English texts, with attention to variation too, particularly in the form of semantic and conceptual variation across text types. The first questions, for me, then, were what exactly constitutes semantics and what we mean when we say concept. These are, in part, abstract questions, but they must also be defined in terms of practical operations for computational linguistics. Put differently, if semantics and concepts are not defined in terms of features that can be identified automatically by computer, then the definitions are not terribly useful for us.

My first attempt at approaching semantics and concepts for the project began with synonymy, then built up to onomasiological relationships, and then defined concepts as networks of onomasiological relationships. Following Kris Heylen’s visit, I realised just how similar this approach was to the most recent QLVL work. My next stab at approaching these terms moved towards an idea of encyclopaedic meaning inspired in part by the ‘encyclopaedic semantics’ of Cognitive Linguistics, and related to sets of words in contexts of use. This approach seemed coherent and effective. We have since come to define concepts, for our purposes, as discursive, operating at a level larger than syntactic relations, phrases, clauses, or sentences, but smaller than an entire text (and therefore dissimilar from topic modelling).

Operations

Given that the project started without a definition of semantics and concept, it follows that the operationalisation of identifying those terms had not been laid out either. As a corpus semanticist, the natural start for me was to sort through corpus methods for automatic semantic analysis, including collocation analysis, second-order collocations, and vector space models. We continue to explore those methods by sorting through various parameters and variables for each. Most importantly, we are working to analyse our data in terms of linguistically meaningful probabilities. That is, we are thinking about the co-occurrence of words not simply as data points that might arise randomly, but as linguistic choices that are rarely, if ever, random. This requires us to consider how often linguistic events such as lexical co-occurrences actually arise, given the opportunity for them to arise. If we hope to use computational tools to learn about language, then we must certainly ensure that our computational approaches incorporate what we know about language, randomness, and probability.

Equally important was the recognition that although we are using corpus methods, we are not working with corpora, or at least not with corpora as per standard definitions. I define a corpus as a linguistic data-set sampled to represent a particular population of language users or of language in use. Corpus linguists examine language samples in order to draw conclusions about the populations they represent. EEBO and ECCO are, crucially, not sampled to represent populations—they are essentially arbitrary data sets, collected on the basis of convenience, of texts’ survival through history, and of scholarly interest and bias, among other variables. It is not at all clear that EEBO and ECCO can be used to draw rigorous conclusions about broader populations. Within the project, we often refer to EEBO and ECCO as ‘universes of printed discourse’, which renders them a sort of population in themselves. From that perspective, we can conclude a great deal about EEBO and ECCO, and the texts they contain, but it is tenuous at best to relate those conclusions to a broader population of language use. This is something that we must continually bear in mind.

Rather than seeing the LDNA processor as a tool for representing linguistic trends across populations, I have recently found it more useful to think of our processor primarily as a tool to aid in information retrieval: it is useful for identifying texts where particular discursive concepts appear. Our tools are therefore expected to be useful for conducting case studies of particular texts and sets of texts that exemplify particular concepts. In a related way, we use the metaphor of a topological map where texts and groups of texts exemplifying concepts rise up like hills from the landscape of the data. The processor allows us to map that topography and then ‘zoom in’ on particular hills for closer examination. This has been a useful metaphor for me in maintaining a sense of the project’s ultimate aims.

All of these topics represent ongoing developments for LDNA, and one of the great pleasures of the project has been the engaging discussions with colleagues about these issues over the last year.

Dr Kris Heylen at the Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield

Learning with Leuven: Kris Heylen’s visit to the HRI

In 2016, Dr Kris Heylen (KU Leuven) spent a week in Sheffield as a HRI Visiting Fellow, demonstrating techniques for studying change in “lexical concepts” and encouraging the Linguistic DNA team to articulate the distinctive features of the “discursive concept”.


Earlier this month, the Linguistic DNA project hosted Dr Kris Heylen of KU Leuven as a visiting fellow (funded by the HRI Visiting European Fellow scheme). Kris is a member of the Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL) research group at KU Leuven, which has conducted unique research into the significance of how words cooccur across different ‘windows’ of text (reported by Seth in an earlier blogpost). Within his role, Kris has had a particular focus on the value of visualisation as a means to explore cooccurrence data and it was this expertise from which the Linguistic DNA project wished to learn.

Kris and his colleagues have worked extensively on how concepts are expressed in language, with case studies in both Dutch and English, drawing on data from the 1990s and 2000s. This approach is broadly sympathetic to our work in Linguistic DNA, though we take an interest in a higher level of conceptual manifestation (“discursive concepts”), whereas the Leuven team are interested in so-called “lexical concepts”.

In an open lecture on Tracking Conceptual Change, Kris gave two examples of how the Leuven techniques (under the umbrella of “distributional semantics”) can be applied to show variation in language use, according to context (e.g. types of newspaper) and over time. A first case study explored the notion of a ‘person with an immigration background’ looking at how this was expressed in high and low brow Dutch-language newspapers in the period from 1999 to 2005. The investigation began with the word allochtoon, and identified (through vector analysis) migrant as the nearest synonym in use. Querying the newspaper data across time exposed the seasonality of media discourse about immigration (high in spring and autumn, low during parliamentary breaks or holidays). It was also possible to document a decrease in ‘market share’ of allochtoon compared with migrant, and—using hierarchical cluster analysis—to show how each term was distributed across different areas of discourse (comparing discussion of legal and labour-market issues, for example). A second comparison examined adjectives of ‘positive evaluation’, using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, 1860-present). Organising each year’s data as a scatter plot in semantic space, the path of an adjective could be traced in relation to others—moving closer to or apart from similar words. The path of terrific from ‘frightening’ to ‘great’ provided a vivid example of change through the 1950s and 1960s.

During his visit, Kris explored some of the first outputs from the Linguistic DNA processor, material printed in the British Isles (or in English) in two years, 1649 and 1699, transcribed for the Text Creation Partnership, and further processed with the MorphAdorner tool developed by Martin Mueller and Philip Burns at NorthWestern. Having run this through additional processes developed at Leuven, Kris led a workshop for Sheffield postgraduate and early career researchers and members of the LDNA team in which we learned different techniques for visualising the distribution of heretics and schismatics in the seventeenth-century.

The lecture audience and workshop participants were drawn from fields including English Literature, History, Computer Science, East Asian Studies, and the School of Languages and Cultures. Prompted partly by the distribution of the Linguistic DNA team (located in Sussex and Glasgow as well as Sheffield), both lecture and workshop were livestreamed over the internet, extending our audiences to Birmingham, Bradford, and Cambridge. We’re exceedingly grateful for the technical support that made this possible.

Time was also set aside to discuss the potential for future collaboration with Kris and others at Leuven, including participation of the QLVL team in LDNA’s next methodological workshop (University of Sussex, September 2016) and other opportunities to build on our complementary fields of expertise.

 

Family and Friends in 18th century England (book cover)

Naomi Tadmor: Semantic analysis of keywords in context

Family and Friends in 18th century England (book cover)On 30 October, Prof. Naomi Tadmor led a workshop at the University of Sheffield, hosted by the Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies. In what follows, I briefly summarise Tadmor’s presentation, and then provide some reflections related to my own work, and to Linguistic DNA.

The key concluding points that Tadmor forwarded are, I think, important for any work with historical texts, and thus also crucial to historical research:

  • Understanding historical language (including word meaning) is necessary for understanding historical texts
  • To understand historical language we must analyse it in context.
  • Analysing historical language in context requires close reading.

Whether we identify as historians, linguists, corpus linguists, literary scholars, or otherwise, we would do well to keep these points in mind.

Tadmor’s take on historical keywords

Tadmor’s specific arguments in the master class focused on kinship terms. In Early Modern English (EModE), there was a broad array of referents for kinship terms such as brother, mother, father, sister, and associated terms like family and friend, which are not likely to be intuitive to a speaker of Present Day English (PDE). Evidence shows, for example, that family often referred to all of the individuals living in a household, including servants, to the possible exclusion of biological relations living outside of the household. The paper Tadmor asked us to read in advance (first published in 1996), supplemented with other examples at the masterclass, provides extensive illustrations of the nuance of family and other kinship terms.

In EModE, there was also a narrow range of semantic or pragmatic implications related to kinship terms: these meanings generally involved social expectations, social networks, or social capital. So, father could refer to ‘biological father’ or ‘father-in-law’ (or even ‘King’), and implied a relationship of social expectation (rather than, for example, a relationship of affection or intimacy, as might be implied in PDE).

By identifying both the array of referents and the implications or senses conveyed by these kinship terms, Tadmor provides a thorough illustration of the terms’ lexical semantics. We can see this method as being motivated by historical questions (about the nature of Early Modern relationships); driven in its first stage by lexicology (insofar as it begins by asking about words, their referents, and senses); and then, in a final stage, employing lexicological knowledge to analyse texts and further address the initial historical questions. Tadmor avoids circularity by using one data set (in her 1996 paper) to identify a hypothesis regarding lexical semantics, and another data set to test her hypothesis. What do these observations about lexical semantics tell us about history? As Tadmor notes, it is by identifying these meanings that we can begin to understand categories of social actions and relationships, as well as motivations for those actions and relationships. Perhaps more fundamentally, it is only by understanding semantics in historical texts, that we can begin to understand the texts meaningfully.

A Corpus Linguist’s take on Tadmor’s methods

Reflecting on Tadmor’s talk, I’m reminded of the utility of the terms semasiology and onomasiology. In semantic research, semasiology is an approach which examines a term as an object of inquiry, and proceeds to identify the meanings of that word. Onomasiology is an approach which begins with a meaning, and then identifies the various terms for expressing it. Tadmor’s method is largely semasiological, insofar as it looks at the meanings of the term family and other kinship terms. This approach begins in a relatively straightforward way—find all of the instances of the word (or lemma), and you can then identify its various senses. The next step is more difficult: how do you distinguish its senses? In linguistics, a range of methods is available, with varying degrees of rigour and reproducibility, and it is important that these methods be outlined clearly. Tadmor’s study is also onomasiological, as she compares the different ways (often within a single text) of referring to a given member of the household family. This approach is less straightforward: how do you identify each time a member of the family is referred to? Again, a range of methods is available, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. A clear statement and justification of the choice of method renders any study more rigorous. In my experience, the systematicity of thinking in terms of onomasiology and semasiology is useful in developing a systematic and rigorous study.

Semasiology and onomasiology allow us to distinguish types of study and approaches to meaning, which can in turn help render our methods more explicit and clear. Similarly, distinguishing editorially between a word (e.g. family) and a meaning (e.g. ‘family’) is useful for clarity. Indeed, thinking methodologically in terms of semasiology and onomasiology encourages clarity of expression editorially regarding terms and meanings. In Tadmor’s 1996 paper, double quotes (e.g. “family”) are used to refer to either the word family or the meaning ‘family’ at various points. At times, such a paper could be rendered more clear, it seems to me, by adopting consistent editorial conventions like those used in linguistics (e.g. quotes or all caps for meanings, italics for terms). The distinction between a term and a meaning is by nature not always clear or certain: that difficulty is all the more reason for journals to adhere to rigorously defined editorial conventions.

From the distinction between terms and concepts, we can move to the distinction between senses and referents. It is important to be explicit both about changes in referent and changes in sense, when discussing semasiological change. For example, as historians and linguists, we must be sure that when we identify changes in a word’s referents (e.g. father referring to ‘father-in-law’), we also identify whether there are changes in its sense (e.g. ‘a relationship of social expectation’ or ‘a relationship of affection and intimacy’). When Thomas Turner refers to his father-in-law as father, he seems to be using the term, as identified by Tadmor, in its Early Modern sense implying ‘a relationship of social expectation’ rather than in the possible PDE sense implying ‘a relationship of affection and intimacy’. The terms referent and sense allow for this distinction, and are useful in practice when conducting this kind of semantic analysis.

Of course, if a term becomes polysemous, it can be applied to a new range of referents, with a new sense, or even with new implicatures or connotations. For example, we can imagine (perhaps counterfactually) a historical development in which family might have come to refer to cohabitants who were not blood relations. At the same time, in referring to those cohabitants who were not blood relations, family might have ceased to imply any kind of social expectation, social network, or social capital. That is, it’s possible for both the referent and the sense to change. In this case, as Tadmor has shown, that doesn’t seem to be what’s happened, but it’s important to investigate such possible polysemies.

Future possibilities: Corpus linguistics

As a corpus linguist, I’d be interested in investigating Tadmor’s semantic findings via a quantitative onomasiological study, looking more closely at selection probabilities. Such a study could ask research questions like:

  • Given that an Early Modern writer is expressing ‘nuclear family’, what is the probability of using term a, b, etc., in various contexts?
  • Given that a writer is expressing ‘household-family’, what is the probability of using term a, b, etc., in various contexts?
  • Given that a writer is expressing ‘spouse’s father’ or ‘brother’s sister’, etc., what is the probability of using term a, b, etc., in various contexts?

These onomasiological research questions (unlike semasiological ones) allow us to investigate logical probabilities of selection processes. This renders statistical analyses more robust. Changes in probabilities of selection over time are a useful illustration of onomasiological change, which is an essential part of semantic change.

And for Linguistic DNA?

For Linguistic DNA, I see (at least) two major questions related to Tadmor’s work:

  1. Can automated distributional analysis uncover the types of phenomena that Tadmor has uncovered for family?
  2. What is a concept for Tadmor, and how can her work inform our notion of a concept?

In response to the first question, it is certainly possible that distributional analysis can reflect changing referents (such as ‘father-in-law’ referred to as father). Hypothetically, the distribution of father with a broad array of referents might entail a broad array of lexical co-occurrences. In practice, however, this might be very, very difficult to discern. Hence Tadmor’s call for close reading. It is perhaps more likely that the sense (as opposed to referent) of father as ‘a relationship involving social expectations’ might be reflected in co-occurrence data: hypothetically, father might co-occur with words related to social expectation and obligation. We have evidence that semantically related words tend to constitute only about 30% of significant co-occurrences. Optimistically, it might be that the remaining 70% of words do suggest semantic relationships, if we know how to interpret them—in this case, maybe some co-occurrences with family would suggest the referents or implications discussed here. Pessimistically, it might be that if only 30% of co-occurring words are semantically related, then there would be an even lower probability of finding co-occurring words that reveal such fine semantic or pragmatic nuances as these. Thanks to Tadmor’s work, Linguistic DNA might be able to use family as a test case for what can be revealed by distributional analysis.

What is a concept? Tadmor (1996) doesn’t define concept, and sometimes switches quickly, for example, between discussing the concept ‘family’ and the word family, which can be tricky to follow. At times, concept for Tadmor seems to be similar to definition—a gloss for a term. At other times, concept seems to be broader, suggesting something perhaps with psycholinguistic reality, a sort of notion or idea held in the mind that might relate to an array of terms. Or, concept seems to relate to discourses, to shared social understandings that are shaped by language use. Linguistic DNA is paying close attention to operationalising and/or defining concept in its approach to conceptual and semantic change in EModE. Tadmor’s work points in the same direction that interests us, and the vagueness of concept which Tadmor engages with is vagueness that we are engaging with as well.