Tracing Antisemitic Language Through Diachronic Embedding Projections: France 1789-1914

Rocco Tripodi, Massimo Warglien, Simon Levis Sullam, Deborah Paci


Abstract
We investigate some aspects of the history of antisemitism in France, one of the cradles of modern antisemitism, using diachronic word embeddings. We constructed a large corpus of French books and periodicals issues that contain a keyword related to Jews and performed a diachronic word embedding over the 1789-1914 period. We studied the changes over time in the semantic spaces of 4 target words and performed embedding projections over 6 streams of antisemitic discourse. This allowed us to track the evolution of antisemitic bias in the religious, economic, socio-politic, racial, ethic and conspiratorial domains. Projections show a trend of growing antisemitism, especially in the years starting in the mid-80s and culminating in the Dreyfus affair. Our analysis also allows us to highlight the peculiar adverse bias towards Judaism in the broader context of other religions.
Anthology ID:
W19-4715
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
115–125
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4715
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4715
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rocco Tripodi, Massimo Warglien, Simon Levis Sullam, and Deborah Paci. 2019. Tracing Antisemitic Language Through Diachronic Embedding Projections: France 1789-1914. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 115–125, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tracing Antisemitic Language Through Diachronic Embedding Projections: France 1789-1914 (Tripodi et al., LChange 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4715.pdf
Code
 roccotrip/antisem