Sociology Seminar 
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Date: 25th of March
Room : 3049

Marshall TAYLOR “Meaningful Geometries: Towards a More Reliable Analysis of Culture using Word Embeddings”

Abstract : 

To what extent do text corpora reflect gender or social class biases? In computational social science, answering these types of questions often involves analyzing semantic dimensions in word embedding spaces. While powerful, this approach relies on “anchor” words that lack standardized reliability assessments. I introduce a new, structure-agnostic metric to fill this gap. I validate the metric at the word-level using expert- and crowd-sourced dictionaries and at the document-level using expert-annotated social media posts. I also provide simulation-based heuristic baselines to facilitate effect size interpretation and null hypothesis testing.

Etienne OLLION (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Paola TUBARO (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Nicolas JULIA (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Patrick PRÄG (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Sponsors:
CREST