Max Boholm


2024

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Can political dogwhistles be predicted by distributional methods for analysis of lexical semantic change?
Max Boholm | Björn Rönnerstrand | Ellen Breitholtz | Robin Cooper | Elina Lindgren | Gregor Rettenegger | Asad Sayeed
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

2023

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Political dogwhistles and community divergence in semantic change
Max Boholm | Asad Sayeed
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

We test whether the development of political dogwhistles can be observed using language change measures; specifically, does the development of a “hidden” message in a dogwhistle show up as differences in semantic change between communities over time? We take Swedish-language dogwhistles related to the on-going immigration debate and measure differences over time in their rate of semantic change between two Swedish-language community forums, Flashback and Familjeliv, the former representing an in-group for understanding the “hidden” meaning of the dogwhistles. We find that multiple measures are sensitive enough to detect differences over time, in that the meaning changes in Flashback over the relevant time period but not in Familjeliv. We also examine the sensitivity of multiple modeling approaches to semantic change in the matter of community divergence.