Eyal Sagi

University of St. Francis · Department of Psychology

In this paper we present a computational text analysis technique for measuring the moral loading of concepts as they are used in a corpus. This method is especially useful for the study of online corpora as it allows for the rapid analysis of moral rhetoric in texts such as blogs and tweets as events unfold. We use Latent Semantic Analysis to compu...

This article looks at the way people determine the antecedent of a pronoun in sentence pairs, such as: Albert invited Ron to dinner. He spent hours cleaning the house. The experiment reported here is motivated by the idea that such judgments depend on reasoning about identity (e.g., the identity of the he who cleaned the house). Because the identit...

Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psychology and public opinion research. Research on framing has traditionally relied on controlled experiments and manually annotated document collections. In this paper we present a method that allows for quantifying the relative strengths of competing lingu...

Psychological researchers have traditionally focused on lab-based experiments to test their theories and hypotheses. Although the lab provides excellent facilities for controlled testing, some questions are best explored by collecting information that is difficult to obtain in the lab. The vast amounts of data now available to researchers can be a...

Metaphors are cognitive and linguistic tools that allow reasoning. They enable the understanding of abstract domains via elements borrowed from concrete ones. The underlying mechanism in metaphorical mapping is the manipulation of concepts. This article proposes another view on what concepts are and their role in metaphor and reasoning. That is, ba...

Does sharing moral values encourage people to connect and form communities? The importance of moral homophily (love of same) has been recognized by social scientists, but the types of moral similarities that drive this phenomenon are still unknown. Using both large-scale, observational social-media analyses and behavioral lab experiments, the autho...

The alignment of bargaining positions is crucial to a successful negotiation. Prior research has shown that similarity in language use is indicative of the conceptual alignment of interlocutors. We use latent semantic analysis to explore how the similarity of language use between negotiating parties develops over the course of a three-party negotia...

Recent years have seen rapid developments in automated text analysis methods focused on measuring psychological and demographic properties. While this development has mainly been driven by computer scientists and computational linguists, such methods can be of great value for social scientists in general, and for psychologists in particular. In thi...

This paper uses methods based on corpus statistics and synonymy to explore the role language history and sound/form relationships play in conceptual organization through a case study relating the phonaestheme gl-to its prevalent Proto-Indo European root, *ghel. The results of both methods point to a strong link between the phonaestheme and the hist...

2-dimensional visualization of the context vectors for terror, war, and crime. 2-dimensional visualization of the context vectors for terror, war, and crime from 1990. Each frame represents the context vectors over a 12-month period up to (and including) the month given in the caption. Because of memory constraints, context vectors for the 3 terms...

Implementation details. (DOC)

What influences the likelihood that a word will be used metaphorically? We tested whether the likelihood of metaphorical use is related to the relationality of a wordtextquoterights meaning. Relational words name relations between entities. We predicted that relational words, such as verbs (e.g., speak) and relational nouns (e.g., marriage) would b...

Detecting that two images are different is faster for highly dissimilar images than for highly similar images. Paradoxically, we showed that the reverse occurs when people are asked to describe how two images differ--that is, to state a difference between two images. Following structure-mapping theory, we propose that this disassociation arises fro...

This dissertation looks at the people use causal coherence information is used to determine the referent of a pronoun in sentence pairs, such as John accused Mark of stealing a car. He called the police. The experiments reported here test the idea that the process of pronoun disambiguation is informed by the causal connection between the person den...

Research in historical semantics relies on the examination, selection, and interpretation of texts from corpora. Changes in meaning are tracked through the collection and careful inspection of examples that span decades and centuries. This process is inextricably tied to the researcher's expertise and familiarity with the corpus. Consequently, the...

In English and other languages, the distribution of nuclear pitch accents within a sentence usually reflects how the meaningful parts of the sentence relate to the context. Generally speaking, the nuclear pitch accent can only occur felicitously on focused parts of the sentence, corresponding to information that is not contextually retrievable or g...

Many theories of discourse structure rely on the idea that the segments comprising the discourse are linked through inferred relations such as causality and temporal contiguity. These theories suggest that the resulting discourse is represented hierarchically. Two experiments examine some of the implications of these hierarchical structures on the...

We present a computational model of visual similarity. The model is based upon the idea that perceptual comparisons may utilize the same mapping processes as are used in analogy. We use the Structure Mapping Engine (SME), a model of Gentner's structure-mapping theory of analogy, to perform comparison on representations that are automatically genera...

This paper presents a new statistical method for detecting and tracking changes in word meaning, based on Latent Semantic Analysis. By comparing the density of semantic vector clusters this method allows researchers to make statistical inferences on questions such as whether the meaning of a word changed across time or if a phonetic cluster is asso...

This paper presents a new statistical method for detecting and tracking changes in word meaning, based on Latent Semantic Analysis. By comparing the density of semantic vector clusters this method allows researchers to make statistical inferences on questions such as whether the meaning of a word changed across time or if a phonetic cluster is asso...

The association between sound and meaning is commonly thought to be symbolic and arbitrary. While this appears to be mostly correct, there is evidence that specific phonetic groupings can be broad indicators of word meaning (Bergen, 2004). Phonaesthemes are sub-morphemic clusters that are predictably related to vague semantic content; this vaguenes...

There is a paradoxical dissociation be- tween recognizing that two stimuli are differ- ent and recognizing how they are different. We show that this dissociation can be captured by modeling perceptual similarity as a species of analogical processes. Using SME to model comparison, we show that the dissociation arises naturally from different stages...

Many theories of discourse structure rely on the idea that the segments comprising the discourse are linked through inferred relations such as causality and temporal contiguity. These theories suggest that all of the information needed to determine the relation can be found when the discourse is interpreted through the application of world knowledg...

In the social sciences, culture is often explored via the use of knowledgeable informants and direct observation. In this paper we present a novel approach for cultural investigation that focuses on the statistical analysis of texts. We use Latent Semantic Analysis to generate a semantic space representing one or more cultures based on a corpus of...