Cultural Cartography with Word Embeddings

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how word embeddings can be used as a tool for cultural cartography, enabling nuanced analysis of social and cultural meanings in discourse, exemplified through U.S. immigration discussions.

Contribution

It introduces methods for navigating word embedding spaces to interpret cultural and social dynamics, linking linguistic models with sociological theories.

Findings

Word embeddings align with sociological theories of meaning.

Navigation strategies reveal cultural shifts and social marking.

Application to immigration discourse illustrates practical insights.

Abstract

Using the frequency of keywords is a classic approach in the formal analysis of text, but has the drawback of glossing over the relationality of word meanings. Word embedding models overcome this problem by constructing a standardized and continuous "meaning space" where words are assigned a location based on relations of similarity to other words based on how they are used in natural language samples. We show how word embeddings are commensurate with prevailing theories of meaning in sociology and can be put to the task of interpretation via two kinds of navigation. First, one can hold terms constant and measure how the embedding space moves around them--much like astronomers measured the changing of celestial bodies with the seasons. Second, one can also hold the embedding space constant and see how documents or authors move relative to it--just as ships use the stars on a given night to determine their location. Using the empirical case of immigration discourse in the United States, we demonstrate the merits of these two broad strategies for advancing important topics in cultural theory, including social marking, media fields, echo chambers, and cultural diffusion and change more broadly.