Integrating semantic directions with concept mover’s distance to measure binary concept engagement

Abstract

In an earlier article published in this journal (“Concept Mover’s Distance”, 2019), we proposed a method for measuring concept engagement in texts that uses word embeddings to find the minimum cost necessary for words in an observed document to “travel” to words in a “pseudo-document” consisting only of words denoting a concept of interest. One potential limitation we noted is that, because words associated with opposing concepts will be located close to one another in the embedding space, documents will likely have similar closeness to starkly opposing concepts (e.g., “life” and “death”). Using aggregate vector differences between antonym pairs to extract a direction in the semantic space pointing toward a pole of the binary opposition (following “The Geometry of Culture,” American Sociological Review, 2019), we illustrate how CMD can be used to measure a document’s engagement with binary concepts.