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stephbuon / democracy-lab

Code, manuals, and concepts for Democracy Lab research and affiliate projects.
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Write Blurb for "Collocates" (github repo) #156

Open stephbuon opened 2 years ago

stephbuon commented 2 years ago

(see syllabus for instructions).

HaileyHazen commented 2 years ago

Collocates

Collocates are groups of words that speakers deliberately use together. Analyzing these words can help scholars understand how a speaker talks about certain ideas, arguments, or events. Examples of common collocates speakers may use are ‘nuclear family,’ ‘declare war,’ ‘climate change,’ and ‘equal rights.’ Word embeddings allow scholars to identify, extract, and count these phrases from a corpus of text to gain a better understanding of the text as a whole.

First, collocates are useful because they reveal different attitudes speakers have towards the same topics. While one speaker may associate the term ‘socialism’ with ‘equality,’ another may link it to ‘poverty.’ Scholars can also track collocates across time. For instance, the United States Congress may have linked the term, ‘debt,’ to words like ‘gambling’ in 1950 but would more likely connect ‘debt’ to the phrase ‘student loan’ in 2022. Therefore, collocates are a useful tool in understanding political perspectives and context across time.