| 1. |
- Bonafilia, Brian, et al.
(författare)
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Sudden Semantic Shifts in Swedish NATO Discourse
- 2023
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Ingår i: Association for Computational Linguistics . Annual Meeting Conference Proceedings. - 0736-587X. ; 4, s. 184-193
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper, we investigate a type of semantic shift that occurs when a sudden event radically changes public opinion on a topic. Looking at Sweden's decision to apply for NATO membership in 2022, we use word embeddings to study how the associations users on Twitter have regarding NATO evolve. We identify several changes that we successfully validate against real-world events. However, the low engagement of the public with the issue often made it challenging to distinguish true signals from noise. We thus find that domain knowledge and data selection are of prime importance when using word embeddings to study semantic shifts.
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| 2. |
- Fredén, Annika, et al.
(författare)
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Insurance Voting in the Centre: An Experimental Approach
- 2024
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Ingår i: International Journal of Public Opinion Research. - 1471-6909 .- 0954-2892. ; 36:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent research suggests that to help their preferred coalition win an election, voters are willing to vote for a political party other than their preferred choice. In this field, voting for smaller parties under proportional representation is an under-studied feature. A crucial factor to estimate the chances for smaller parties is polls. In this study, we analyze the influence of opinion polls on switching vote choice to a smaller party when the party polls are at different levels. Building on an original survey experiment, we elaborate the potential differences in impact on insurance voting for a small party with looser or stronger association with a government alternative. The focus is the 2022 Swedish general election and the three smallest parties in parliament: the Green Party (center-left), the Christian Democrats (right), and the Liberals (center-right). The experiment had nine different conditions where each of these parties was placed at different levels of opinion: below, at, and above the parliamentary threshold, while holding all other factors constant. We find that poll-induced insurance voting is most prevalent for the party with the strongest preference for a government alternative (the Christian Democrats) and least prevalent for the party with a more issue-focused stance (the Greens).
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| 3. |
- Kokkinakis, Dimitrios, 1965, et al.
(författare)
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The Prevalence of mRNA Related Discussions during the Post-COVID-19 Era
- 2023
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Ingår i: Caring is Sharing - Exploiting the Value in Data for Health and Innovation - Proceedings of MIE 2023. - : IOS Press. - 0926-9630 .- 1879-8365. - 9781643683881 ; 302, s. 798-802
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy and skepticism are raising serious concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. In this study, we use Swedish social media data and structural topic modeling to automatically identify mRNA-vaccine related discussion themes and gain deeper insights into how people's refusal or acceptance of the mRNA technology affects vaccine uptake. Our point of departure is a scientific study published in February 2022, which seems to once again sparked further suspicion and concern and highlight the necessity to focus on issues about the nature and trustworthiness in vaccine safety. Structural topic modelling is a statistical method that facilitates the study of topic prevalence, temporal topic evolution, and topic correlation automatically. Using such a method, our research goal is to identify the current understanding of the mechanisms on how the public perceives the mRNA vaccine in the light of new experimental findings.
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| 4. |
- Bender, Benedikt, et al.
(författare)
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Patterns in the Press Releases of Trade Unions: How toUse Structural Topic Models in the Field of Industrial Relations
- 2022
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Ingår i: Industrielle Beziehungen. - : Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH. - 0943-2779 .- 1862-0035. ; 29:2, s. 91-116
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Quantitative text analysis and the use of large data sets have received only limited attention in the field of Industrial Relations. This is unfortunate, given the variety of opportunities and possibilities these methods can address. We demonstrate the use of one promising technique of quantitative text analysis – the Structural Topic Model (STM) – to test the Insider-Outsider theory. This technique allowed us to find underlying topics in atext corpus of nearly 2,000 German trade union press releases (from 2000 to 2014). We provide astep-by-step overview of how to use STMsince we see this method as useful to the future of research in the field of Industrial Relations. Until now the methodological publications regarding STM mostly focus on the mathematics of the method and provide only aminimal discussion of their implementation. Instead, we provide apractical application of STM and apply this method to one of the most prominenttheories in the field of Industrial Relations. Contrary to the original Insider-Outsider arguments, but in line with thecurrent state of research, we show that unions do in fact use topics within their press releases which are relevant for both Insider and Outsider groups.
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| 5. |
- Bruinsma, Sebastianus Cornelis Jacobus, 1991, et al.
(författare)
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A Move Forward: Exploring National Identity Through Non-linear Principal Component Analysis in Germany
- 2023
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Ingår i: Quality and Quantity. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1573-7845 .- 0033-5177. ; 57:1, s. 885-903
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In research on national identity, scholars have developed a wide variety of approaches to measure and better understand this ubiquitous yet complex concept. To date, most of these approaches have been theory-driven, while only a very few have been data-driven. In this article, we aim to contribute to the latter by introducing a new data-driven method that has not been applied yet—that of non-linear principal component analysis (NLPCA). In contrast to other commonly used methods such as factor analysis, NLPCA distinguishes itself by making relatively few assumptions about the data and by allowing for greater flexibility when discovering underlying dimensions of such a complex concept as national identity. Drawing on the 2013 ISSP National Identity module, our analysis focuses on the case of Germany, also taking into account Western and Eastern Germany. Running an NLPCA, we find four dimensions that cover the multidimensionality of national identity: nationalistic attitudes, national pride and attachment, cosmopolitan beliefs, and membership criteria defining national belonging. This article contributes to the empirical debate on measuring national identity by suggesting a new and flexible methodological approach that better grasps the concept’s complexity and which we believe can move empirical research on national identity forward in and beyond Germany.
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| 6. |
- Bruinsma, Sebastianus Cornelis Jacobus, 1991, et al.
(författare)
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Finding the structure of parliamentary motions in the Swedish Riksdag 1971–2015
- 2024
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Ingår i: Quality and Quantity. - 1573-7845 .- 0033-5177. ; 58:4, s. 3275-3301
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The current increase in the number of large, open sets of unstructured textual data has created both opportunities and challenges for social scientists. Here, we explore if and how we can use such data by looking at a dataset of over 144,000 documents used by parliamentary committees in Sweden. Of these, we aim to understand: (a) the topical content of these motions, (b) how these topics have changed over time, and (c) how these topics differ across political parties. To do so, we use a Structural Topic Model, which allows us to not only find the topics using the textual data itself, but also to include the documents’ metadata, such as authorship and date of publication. Doing so, we find 30 topics, which we combine into 9 broader themes. We find that these themes often rise and fall in popularity in line with historical events, and relate to the various political parties as we would expect. Throughout our analysis, we provide a step-by-step overview of how to use structural topic models in practice and also how to handle the type of dataset we use here.
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| 7. |
- Bruinsma, Sebastianus Cornelis Jacobus, 1991
(författare)
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Measuring Congruence Between Voters and Parties in Online Surveys: Does Question Wording Matter?
- 2023
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Ingår i: Methods, Data, Analyses. - 2190-4936 .- 1864-6956. ; 17:1, s. 71-92
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Congruence on policies between political parties and voters is a frequently assumed requirement for democracy. To be able to study this, we should be able to calculate accurate and precise measures of policy congruence in political systems. This could then tell us more about the political system we study, and the "distances" that exist between parties and voters on either issues or broader ideological dimensions. Here, I draw on experimental data from a Voting Advice Application to show that the wording of the issues can influence the degree of congruence one measures. Yet, this comes with the complication that this influence depends on the type of issue, the characteristics of the voters themselves, and the party the congruence is calculated with. These findings should serve as a warning for those who aim to measure congruence that even minor changes in question-wording can ( but do not have to) cause relatively large changes in congruence, especially when many parties are involved and the differences between the congruences are small.
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| 8. |
- Kokkinakis, Dimitrios, 1965, et al.
(författare)
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Investigating the Effects of MWE Identification in Structural Topic Modelling
- 2023
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Ingår i: 19th Workshop on Multiword Expressions, MWE 2023 - Proceedings. - : ACL. ; , s. 36-44
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Multiword expressions (MWEs) are common word combinations which exhibit idiosyncrasies in various linguistic levels. For various downstream natural language processing applications and tasks, the identification and discovery of MWEs has been proven to be potentially practical and useful, but still challenging to codify. In this paper we investigate various, relevant to MWE, resources and tools for Swedish, and, within a specific application scenario, we apply structural topic modelling to investigate whether there are any interpretative advantages of identifying MWEs.
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| 9. |
- Sverdljuk, Jana, et al.
(författare)
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The COVID-19 Vaccine Discussion on Twitter: Arguments of Sceptics and Supporters
- 2024
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Ingår i: Vaccine Hesitancy in the Nordic Countries: Trust and Distrust during the COVID-19 Pandemic. - 9781040011614 ; , s. 185-204
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The chapter analyses the COVID-19 vaccine discussion on Twitter based on a collection of more than one million tweets collected between 1 January 2020 and 1 September 2021, with a focus on a Nordic sub-corpus of 3,401 tweets. Our research questions are: what were the main discussion topics and core arguments behind vaccine acceptance or scepticism? Also, how did opponents and advocates of vaccination treat each other - did they remain in the framework of social trust? Social or generalised trust is defined as society’s readiness for conflict-free and respectful communication based on the principles of solidarity, truthfulness, and spontaneous altruism. By combining structural topic modelling (STM) with thematic analysis, the chapter shows that while vaccine supporters spoke of solidarity, sceptics were concerned with free choice. The chapter provides an analysis of how these arguments were formulated when discussing such topics as herd immunity, mandatory vaccination, and the role of politicians in solving the COVID-19 crisis. Pointedly, the authors observed an acute lack of mutual respect and the ability to conduct a constructive dialogue between the two groups. For Nordic societies to maintain a basic level of trust, it is necessary to include various groups in decision-making and public deliberation processes based on respect.
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