Author:

Keywords:

distributional semantics, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, visualization

Abstract:

In previous work (Peirsman, Heylen & Geeraerts 2010), we have shown how Semantic Vector Spaces can serve as an explorative tool to investigate in large data collections which wording is used to construe attitudes towards religions and how these change over time. In this paper we extend this work and use Semantic Vector Spaces to identify construal patterns in immigration discourse and we analyze the construal on the more fine grained level of specific utterances. As a case study, we look at immigration discourse in Belgium and the Netherlands in the period that both countries experienced a break-through of political parties with a strong anti-immigration platform (Vlaams Blok in Belgium in 1999 and Lijst Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands in 2002). In a 1.3 million word corpus of Dutch and Belgian newspapers from 1999 to 2005, we collect the occurrences of lexemes referring to the concept IMMIGRANT in Dutch: allochtoon, vreemdeling, (im)migrant, buitenlander, nieuwkomer. We use Semantic Vector Spaces both on a type-level and a token-level (Turney & Pantel 2010, Heylen,Speelman & Geeraerts 2012) to structure the meaning relations between the lexemes and between their occurrences based on the similarity of their contextual usage. Multi Dimensional Scaling allows us to represent these contextual similarities in a 2-dimensional semantic space. Using an interactive visualization, we can then analyze the different construal patterns and their contextual realizations, the differences between the Netherlands and Belgium and between different newspapers, as well as the change in the construal patterns from 1999 to 2005.