scholarly journals Chaining algorithms and historical adjective extension

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Xu ◽  
Karan Grewal
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Probabilistic Models ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Semantic Space ◽  
Context Model ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Text ◽  
Google Books ◽  
Infinite Set ◽  
Over Time

Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express a potentially infinite set of ideas. This tension often results in the innovative reuse of existing words to describe emerging ideas. In this chapter, we take a computational perspective to examine how English adjectives extend their range over time to modify nouns and form previously unattested adjective-noun pairs. We hypothesize that how novel adjective-noun pairings emerge is non-arbitrary and follows a process of chaining, whereby novel noun referents for an adjective link to existing nouns modified by the same adjective that are close in semantic space. We test this proposal by exploring a set of probabilistic models that predict adjective-noun pairs from a historical text corpus (Google Books) that spans the past 150 years. Our findings across three diverse sets of adjectives support a chaining mechanism sensitive to local semantic neighbourhood -- formulated as an exemplar model of categorization similar to the Generalized Context Model. These findings mirror existing work on chaining in the historical growth of grammatical categories. We discuss the limitations and implications of our approach toward a general theory of word meaning extension in natural language.

scholarly journals Why does library holding format really matter for book impact assessment?: Modelling the relationship between citations and altmetrics with print and electronic holdings

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashraf Maleki
Keyword(s):  
Impact Assessment ◽  
Regression Models ◽  
Weak Correlation ◽  
Follow Up Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
Google Books ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Statistical Results ◽  
Over Time

AbstractScholarly books are important outputs in some fields and their many publishing formats seem to introduce opportunities to scrutinize their impact. As there is a growing interest in the publisher-enforced massive collection of ebooks in libraries in the past decade, this study examined how this influences the relationship that library print holdings (LPH), library electronic holdings (LEH) and total library holdings (TLH) have with other metrics. As a follow up study to a previous research on OCLC library holdings, the relationship between library holdings and twelve other metrics including Scopus Citations, Google Books (GB) Citations, Goodreads engagements, and Altmetric indicators were examined for 119,794 Scopus-indexed book titles across 26 fields. Present study confirms the weak correlation levels observed between TLH and other indicators in previous studies and contributes additional evidence that print holdings can moderately reflect research, educational and online impact of books consistently more efficient than eholdings and total holdings across fields and over time, except for Mendeley for which eholdings slightly prevailed. Regression models indicated that along with other dimensions, Google Books Citations frequently best explained LPH (in 14 out of 26 fields), whereas Goodreads User counts were weak, but the best predictor of both LEH and TLH (in 15 fields out of 26), suggesting significant association of eholdings with online uptake of books. Overall, findings suggest that inclusion of eholdings overrides the more impactful counts of print holdings in Total Library Holdings metric and therefore undermines the statistical results, whilst print holdings has both statistically and theoretically promising underlying assumptions for prediction of impact of books and shows greater promise than the general Library Holding metric for book impact assessment. Thus, there is a need for a distinction between print and electronic holding counts to be made, otherwise total library holding data need to be interpreted with caution.

scholarly journals Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (30) ◽  
pp. e2102061118
Author(s):  
Johan Bollen ◽  
Marijn ten Thij ◽  
Fritz Breithaupt ◽  
Alexander T. J. Barron ◽  
Lauren A. Rutter ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Cognitive Distortions ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
Google Books ◽  
Writing Standards

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

scholarly journals Algorithms in the historical emergence of word senses

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (10) ◽  
pp. 2323-2328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Ramiro ◽  
Mahesh Srinivasan ◽  
Barbara C. Malt ◽  
Yang Xu
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Temporal Order ◽  
Nearest Neighbor ◽  
Computational Framework ◽  
Cognitive Efficiency ◽  
The Past ◽  
Generative Processes ◽  
Infinite Set ◽  
Word Senses ◽  
Over Time

Human language relies on a finite lexicon to express a potentially infinite set of ideas. A key result of this tension is that words acquire novel senses over time. However, the cognitive processes that underlie the historical emergence of new word senses are poorly understood. Here, we present a computational framework that formalizes competing views of how new senses of a word might emerge by attaching to existing senses of the word. We test the ability of the models to predict the temporal order in which the senses of individual words have emerged, using an historical lexicon of English spanning the past millennium. Our findings suggest that word senses emerge in predictable ways, following an historical path that reflects cognitive efficiency, predominantly through a process of nearest-neighbor chaining. Our work contributes a formal account of the generative processes that underlie lexical evolution.

An historical analysis of species references in American English

Corpora ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Craig Frayne
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
American English ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Google Books

This study uses the two largest available American English language corpora, Google Books and the Corpus of Historical American English (coha), to investigate relations between ecology and language. The paper introduces ecolinguistics as a promising theme for corpus research. While some previous ecolinguistic research has used corpus approaches, there is a case to be made for quantitative methods that draw on larger datasets. Building on other corpus studies that have made connections between language use and environmental change, this paper investigates whether linguistic references to other species have changed in the past two centuries and, if so, how. The methodology consists of two main parts: an examination of the frequency of common names of species followed by aspect-level sentiment analysis of concordance lines. Results point to both opportunities and challenges associated with applying corpus methods to ecolinguistc research.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Telesca Giuseppe
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Past ◽  
Final Goal ◽  
Social Structural ◽  
Country Analysis ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Over Time

The ambition of this book is to combine different bodies of scholarship that in the past have been interested in (1) providing social/structural analysis of financial elites, (2) measuring their influence, or (3) exploring their degree of persistence/circulation. The final goal of the volume is to investigate the adjustment of financial elites to institutional change, and to assess financial elites’ contribution to institutional change. To reach this goal, the nine chapters of the book introduced here look at financial elites’ role in different European societies and markets over time, and provide historical comparisons and country and cross-country analysis of their adaptation and contribution to the transformation of the national and international regulatory/cultural context in the wake of a crisis or in a longer term perspective.

Newman's Early Roman Catholic Legacy, 1845-1854

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Over Time

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Downes ◽  
Sally Holloway ◽  
Sarah Randles
Keyword(s):  
Material World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Over Time

This book is about the ways in which humans have been bound affectively to the material world in and over time; how they have made, commissioned, and used objects to facilitate their emotional lives; how they felt about their things; and the ways certain things from the past continue to make people feel today. The temporal and geographical focus of ...

Anti-corruption in History

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Wellbeing ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Legitimate Power ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Over Time

Anticorruption in History is the first major collection of case studies on how past societies and polities, in and beyond Europe, defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. It is a timely book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem, undermining trust in government, financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the “path to Denmark”—a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subjects of corruption and anticorruption have captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country’s image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. A wide range of historical contexts are addressed, ranging from the ancient to the modern period, with specific insights for policy makers offered throughout.

Preserving without conserving: Memoryscopes and historically burdened heritage

2021 ◽  
pp. 105971232110008
Author(s):  
John Sutton
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Sensory Responses ◽  
Over Time

Rather than conserving or ignoring historically burdened heritage, RAAAF intervene. Their responses are striking, sometimes dramatic or destructive. Prompted by Rietveld’s discussion of the Luftschloss project, I compare some other places with difficult pasts which engage our embodied and sensory responses, without such active redirection or disruption. Ross Gibson’s concept of a ‘memoryscope’ helps us identify distinct but complementary ways of focussing the forces of the past. Emotions and imaginings are transmitted over time in many forms. The past is not easily washed, blasted or sliced away. By considering other settings and modes of encounter, we can recognise and applaud the novelty of RAAAF’s interventions while urging further attention to the variable dynamics and rhythms of remembering and of sociomaterial residues.

scholarly journals Ecodesign—A Review of Reviews

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 315
Author(s):  
Malte Schäfer ◽  
Manuel Löwer
Keyword(s):  
Success Factors ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Pollution Prevention ◽  
Past Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Review Articles ◽  
Complete Life Cycle ◽  
Review Of Reviews ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Over Time

With the intent of summing up the past research on ecodesign and making it more accessible, we gather findings from 106 existing review articles in this field. Five research questions on terminology, evolution, barriers and success factors, methods and tools, and synergies, guide the clustering of the resulting 608 statements extracted from the reference. The quantitative analysis reveals that the number of review articles has been increasing over time. Furthermore, most statements originate from Europe, are published in journals, and address barriers and success factors. For the qualitative analysis, the findings are grouped according to the research question they address. We find that several names for similar concepts exist, with ecodesign being the most popular one. It has evolved from “end-of-pipe” pollution prevention to a more systemic concept, and addresses the complete life cycle. Barriers and success factors extend beyond the product development team to management, customers, policymakers, and educators. The number of ecodesign methods and tools available to address them is large, and more reviewing, testing, validation, and categorization of the existing ones is necessary. Synergies between ecodesign and other research disciplines exist in theory, but require implementation and testing in practice.

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