Year: 2017
Type: preprint
Abstract: When performing a conceptual analysis of a concept, philosophers are interested in all forms of expression of a concept in a text---be it direct or indirect, explicit or implicit. In this paper, we experiment with topic-based methods of automating the detection of concept expressions in order to facilitate philosophical conceptual analysis. We propose six methods based on LDA, and evaluate them on a new corpus of court decision that we had annotated by experts and non-experts. Our results indicate that these methods can yield important improvements over the keyword heuristic, which is often used as a concept detection heuristic in many contexts. While more work remains to be done, this indicates that detecting concepts through topics can serve as a general-purpose method for at least some forms of concept expression that are not captured using naive keyword approaches.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: Université du Québec à Montréal, McGill University
Language: English
Subfield: General Social Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2963234356