The early days of contemporary philosophy of science: novel insights from machine translation and topic-modeling of non-parallel multilingual corpora.

Topic model is a well proven tool to investigate the semantic content of textual corpora. Yet corpora sometimes include texts in several languages, making it impossible to apply language-specific computational approaches over their entire content. This is the problem we encountered when setting to a...

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Publicado en:Synthese Vol. 200; no. 3; pp. 1 - 15
Autores principales: Malaterre, Christophe, Lareau, Francis
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Jun2022
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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          Malaterre, Christophe
          Lareau, Francis
        affil:
          Département de philosophie and Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), 455 Boulevard René-Lévesque Est, H3C 3P8, Montreal, QC, Canada
          Département d’informatique, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), 201 av. Président-Kennedy, H2X 3Y7, Montreal, QC, Canada
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        History of philosophy of science
        LDA
        Machine translation
        Multilingual corpus
        Philosophy of science
        Topic model
      ab: Topic model is a well proven tool to investigate the semantic content of textual corpora. Yet corpora sometimes include texts in several languages, making it impossible to apply language-specific computational approaches over their entire content. This is the problem we encountered when setting to analyze a philosophy of science corpus spanning over eight decades and including original articles in Dutch, German and French, on top of a large majority of articles in English. To circumvent this multilingual problem, we use machine-translation tools to bulk translate non-English documents into English. Though largely imperfect, especially syntactically, these translations nevertheless provide correctly translated terms and preserve the semantic proximity of documents with respect to one another. To assess the quality of this translation step, we develop a “semantic topology preservation test” that relies on estimating the extent to which document-to-document distances have been preserved during translation. We then conduct an LDA topic-model analysis over the entire corpus of translated and English original texts, and compare it to a topic-model done over the English original texts only. We thereby identify the specific contribution of the translated texts. These studies reveal a more complete picture of main topics that can found in the philosophy of science literature, especially during the early days of the discipline when numerous articles were published in languages other than English.
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