Kai-Robin Lange

Kai-Robin Lange, Jonas Rieger, Carsten Jentsch

Unsupervised text classification, with its most common form being sentiment analysis, used to be performed by counting words in a text that were stored in a lexicon, which assigns each word to one class or as a neutral word. In recent years, these lexicon-based methods fell out of favor and were replaced by computationally demanding fine-tuning techniques for encoder-only models such as BERT and zero-shot classification using decoder-only models such as GPT-4. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach: Lex2Sent, which provides improvement over classic lexicon methods but does not require any GPU or external hardware. To classify texts, we train embedding models to determine the distances between document embeddings and the embeddings of the parts of a suitable lexicon. We employ resampling, which results in a bagging effect, boosting the performance of the classification. We show that our model outperforms lexica and provides a basis for a high performing few-shot fine-tuning approach in the task of binary sentiment analysis.

Imene Kolli, Kai-Robin Lange, Jonas Rieger et al.

We propose an interpretable, graph-based framework for analyzing semantic shift in diachronic corpora. For each target word and time slice, we induce a word-centered semantic network that integrates distributional similarity from diachronic Skip-gram embeddings with lexical substitutability from time-specific masked language models. We identify sense-related structure by clustering the peripheral graph, align clusters across time via node overlap, and track change through cluster composition and normalized cluster mass. In an application study on a corpus of New York Times Magazine articles (1980 - 2017), we show that graph connectivity reflects polysemy dynamics and that the induced communities capture contrasting trajectories: event-driven sense replacement (trump), semantic stability with cluster over-segmentation effects (god), and gradual association shifts tied to digital communication (post). Overall, word-centered semantic graphs offer a compact and transparent representation for exploring sense evolution without relying on predefined sense inventories.

Kai-Robin Lange, Carsten Jentsch

The application of natural language processing on political texts as well as speeches has become increasingly relevant in political sciences due to the ability to analyze large text corpora which cannot be read by a single person. But such text corpora often lack critical meta information, detailing for instance the party, age or constituency of the speaker, that can be used to provide an analysis tailored to more fine-grained research questions. To enable researchers to answer such questions with quantitative approaches such as natural language processing, we provide the SpeakGer data set, consisting of German parliament debates from all 16 federal states of Germany as well as the German Bundestag from 1947-2023, split into a total of 10,806,105 speeches. This data set includes rich meta data in form of information on both reactions from the audience towards the speech as well as information about the speaker's party, their age, their constituency and their party's political alignment, which enables a deeper analysis. We further provide three exploratory analyses, detailing topic shares of different parties throughout time, a descriptive analysis of the development of the age of an average speaker as well as a sentiment analysis of speeches of different parties with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kai-Robin Lange, Tobias Schmidt, Matthias Reccius et al.

With rapidly evolving media narratives, it has become increasingly critical to not just extract narratives from a given corpus but rather investigate, how they develop over time. While popular narrative extraction methods such as Large Language Models do well in capturing typical narrative elements or even the complex structure of a narrative, applying them to an entire corpus comes with obstacles, such as a high financial or computational cost. We propose a combination of the language understanding capabilities of Large Language Models with the large scale applicability of topic models to dynamically model narrative shifts across time using the Narrative Policy Framework. We apply a topic model and a corresponding change point detection method to find changes that concern a specific topic of interest. Using this model, we filter our corpus for documents that are particularly representative of that change and feed them into a Large Language Model that interprets the change that happened in an automated fashion and distinguishes between content and narrative shifts. We employ our pipeline on a corpus of The Wall Street Journal news paper articles from 2009 to 2023. Our findings indicate that a Large Language Model can efficiently extract a narrative shift if one exists at a given point in time, but does not perform as well when having to decide whether a shift in content or a narrative shift took place.

Kai-Robin Lange, Jonas Rieger, Niklas Benner et al.

From a monarchy to a democracy, to a dictatorship and back to a democracy -- the German political landscape has been constantly changing ever since the first German national state was formed in 1871. After World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany was formed in 1949. Since then every plenary session of the German Bundestag was logged and even has been digitized over the course of the last few years. We analyze these texts using a time series variant of the topic model LDA to investigate which events had a lasting effect on the political discourse and how the political topics changed over time. This allows us to detect changes in word frequency (and thus key discussion points) in political discourse.

Tobias Schmidt, Kai-Robin Lange, Matthias Reccius et al.

As interest in economic narratives has grown in recent years, so has the number of pipelines dedicated to extracting such narratives from texts. Pipelines often employ a mix of state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques, such as BERT, to tackle this task. While effective on foundational linguistic operations essential for narrative extraction, such models lack the deeper semantic understanding required to distinguish extracting economic narratives from merely conducting classic tasks like Semantic Role Labeling. Instead of relying on complex model pipelines, we evaluate the benefits of Large Language Models (LLMs) by analyzing a corpus of Wall Street Journal and New York Times newspaper articles about inflation. We apply a rigorous narrative definition and compare GPT-4o outputs to gold-standard narratives produced by expert annotators. Our results suggests that GPT-4o is capable of extracting valid economic narratives in a structured format, but still falls short of expert-level performance when handling complex documents and narratives. Given the novelty of LLMs in economic research, we also provide guidance for future work in economics and the social sciences that employs LLMs to pursue similar objectives.

Kai-Robin Lange, Niklas Benner, Lars Grönberg et al.

Text data is inherently temporal. The meaning of words and phrases changes over time, and the context in which they are used is constantly evolving. This is not just true for social media data, where the language used is rapidly influenced by current events, memes and trends, but also for journalistic, economic or political text data. Most NLP techniques however consider the corpus at hand to be homogenous in regard to time. This is a simplification that can lead to biased results, as the meaning of words and phrases can change over time. For instance, running a classic Latent Dirichlet Allocation on a corpus that spans several years is not enough to capture changes in the topics over time, but only portraits an "average" topic distribution over the whole time span. Researchers have developed a number of tools for analyzing text data over time. However, these tools are often scattered across different packages and libraries, making it difficult for researchers to use them in a consistent and reproducible way. The ttta package is supposed to serve as a collection of tools for analyzing text data over time.