A portrait of the artist as a young man.

Oliver Baumann

No text without context

No text without context

Reddit, Jane Austen, and vector spaces

Oliver Baumann

Round Table of RDM — 19th July 2022

Context matters!

Word embeddings

  • Distributional semantics: a term’s meaning is influenced from surrounding words
  • numeric representation of text, usually as vectors
  • vectors of words with similar meaning are also close in representation-space
  • algebraic operations: \(\vec{King} + \vec{Woman} = \vec{Queen}\)

he married a more amiable woman, he might have been

he married a more amiable woman, he might have been

he married a more amiable woman, he might have been

he married a more amiable woman, he might have been

to wish to marry a woman who had not either a

was a very cheerful agreeable woman, he hoped the young

Case study

Jane Austen

  • Sense & Sensibility
  • Pride & Prejudice
  • Mansfield Park
  • Emma
  • Northanger Abbey
  • Persuasion

Reddit

  • /r/TwoXChromosomes
  • /r/OneY
  • /r/ainbow
  • /r/Equality
  • /r/ConservativeLadies
  • /r/Feminism
  • /r/BlackHair
  • /r/brownbeauty
  • /r/blackgirls
  • /r/blackladies

Woman

Austen

Reddit

Black

Austen

Reddit

Kiss

Austen

Reddit

Networks and context

Thanks!

@olibaumann

oliver.baumann@uni-bayreuth.de