Insights into social phenomenon can be gleaned from trends and patterns in corpora of documents associated with that phenomenon. Recent years have witnessed the use of computational techniques, mostly based on keywords, to analyze large corpora for these purposes. In this paper, we extend these techniques to incorporate semantic features. We introduce Doris, an interactive exploration tool that combines semantic features with information retrieval techniques to enable exploration of document corpora corresponding to the social phenomenon. We discuss the semantic techniques and describe an implementation on a corpus of United States (US) presidential speeches. We illustrate, with examples, how the ability to combine syntactic and semantic features in a visualization helps researchers more easily gain insights into the underlying phenomenon.
Though the use of computational techniques for analyzing text corpora in the context of social science research is relatively new, there is already a rich and growing body of work that use various techniques drawn from the information retrieval community in order to better understand social and political phenomenon.The work by Shen, Aiden, Norvig, et. al. @cite_10 , which performed a quantitative analysis of the unigrams and bigrams in millions of digitized books, though very simple in its analysis, was very influential. It illustrated how even simple techniques, when applied across very large corpora, can provide interesting insights.
@cite_10
2019096529
We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4 of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.