Achieving Semantic Consistency: Contextualized Word Representations for Political Text Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Ruiyu, Nie, Lin, Zhao, Ce, Chen, Qingyang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhang, Ruiyu
Nie, Lin
Zhao, Ce
Chen, Qingyang
author_facet Zhang, Ruiyu
Nie, Lin
Zhao, Ce
Chen, Qingyang
contents Accurately interpreting words is vital in political science text analysis; some tasks require assuming semantic stability, while others aim to trace semantic shifts. Traditional static embeddings, like Word2Vec effectively capture long-term semantic changes but often lack stability in short-term contexts due to embedding fluctuations caused by unbalanced training data. BERT, which features transformer-based architecture and contextual embeddings, offers greater semantic consistency, making it suitable for analyses in which stability is crucial. This study compares Word2Vec and BERT using 20 years of People's Daily articles to evaluate their performance in semantic representations across different timeframes. The results indicate that BERT outperforms Word2Vec in maintaining semantic stability and still recognizes subtle semantic variations. These findings support BERT's use in text analysis tasks that require stability, where semantic changes are not assumed, offering a more reliable foundation than static alternatives.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_04505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Achieving Semantic Consistency: Contextualized Word Representations for Political Text Analysis
Zhang, Ruiyu
Nie, Lin
Zhao, Ce
Chen, Qingyang
Computation and Language
General Economics
Economics
Accurately interpreting words is vital in political science text analysis; some tasks require assuming semantic stability, while others aim to trace semantic shifts. Traditional static embeddings, like Word2Vec effectively capture long-term semantic changes but often lack stability in short-term contexts due to embedding fluctuations caused by unbalanced training data. BERT, which features transformer-based architecture and contextual embeddings, offers greater semantic consistency, making it suitable for analyses in which stability is crucial. This study compares Word2Vec and BERT using 20 years of People's Daily articles to evaluate their performance in semantic representations across different timeframes. The results indicate that BERT outperforms Word2Vec in maintaining semantic stability and still recognizes subtle semantic variations. These findings support BERT's use in text analysis tasks that require stability, where semantic changes are not assumed, offering a more reliable foundation than static alternatives.
title Achieving Semantic Consistency: Contextualized Word Representations for Political Text Analysis
topic Computation and Language
General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04505