@inproceedings{bonafilia-etal-2023-sudden,
    title = "Sudden Semantic Shifts in {S}wedish {NATO} discourse",
    author = "Bonafilia, Brian  and
      Bruinsma, Bastiaan  and
      Saynova, Denitsa  and
      Johansson, Moa",
    editor = "Padmakumar, Vishakh  and
      Vallejo, Gisela  and
      Fu, Yao",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-srw.28",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-srw.28",
    pages = "184--193",
    abstract = "In this paper, we investigate a type of semantic shift that occurs when a sudden event radically changes public opinion on a topic. Looking at Sweden{'}s decision to apply for NATO membership in 2022, we use word embeddings to study how the associations users on Twitter have regarding NATO evolve. We identify several changes that we successfully validate against real-world events. However, the low engagement of the public with the issue often made it challenging to distinguish true signals from noise. We thus find that domain knowledge and data selection are of prime importance when using word embeddings to study semantic shifts.",
}

In this paper, we investigate a type of semantic shift that occurs when a sudden event radically changes public opinion on a topic. Looking at Sweden{'}s decision to apply for NATO membership in 2022, we use word embeddings to study how the associations users on Twitter have regarding NATO evolve. We identify several changes that we successfully validate against real-world events. However, the low engagement of the public with the issue often made it challenging to distinguish true signals from noise. We thus find that domain knowledge and data selection are of prime importance when using word embeddings to study semantic shifts.
Bonafilia, Brian Bruinsma, Bastiaan Saynova, Denitsa Johansson, Moa
Sudden Semantic Shifts in Swedish NATO discourse