Semantic shift in social networks

This repository contains the research code for the paper Semantic shift in social networks. The paper explores the relationship beetween various community characteristics and the amount of semantic change that takes place in how the community uses words.

I hope the code is useful for people trying to replicate our results or try something new! If there's anything missing or if you have questions, feel free to email me or even make a pull request.

I used a nix environment to run this, which can be found in /nix, but most of the dependencies should als be in requirements.txt.

Downloading data

We use comments from different communities on Reddit (subreddits) to investigate semantic shift at the community level. First, we select 46 subreddits with enough data between 2015 and 2017. The subreddits used in the paper can be found in chosen_subs.txt. You can also choose new subreddits using the same criteria we used by running

python3 -m data path/to/google-api-credentials.json choose-subs --google-project project_name --google-bucket bucket_name

We used pushshift.io's Google BigQuery tables of Reddit comments to filter and download data, so you need a Google Cloud account to run the commands in data.py.

The other commands in data.py take a similar syntax. query-sample downloads a sample of comments (balanced by subreddit) to a provided temporary Google Storage bucket, and split-subs splits the results of query-sample into subreddit/year corpora. query-subs is like query-sample but downloads the full corpus of comments for the 2015 and 2017. This is used to build the social network graphs.

Preprocessing

Preprocessing commands are meant to be run in this order:

1. `dedupe-subs` -- remove duplicate comments from each subreddit's corpus (including "template" comments made by bots)
2. `tokenize` -- tokenize using SpaCy, remove markdown formatting, "banned" characters, etc.
3. `prep-train-files` -- normalize each subreddit corpus to the same number of tokens
4. `make-vocab` -- create a vocab for each subreddit corpus.

Social network

Computing the social network and clustering coefficient is done in network.py. Three variants are computed: strong, weak and full. Strong only considers edges with >1 interaction, weak only considers edges with 1 interaction and full considers both. They are all very closely correlated so we only used full in the paper.

Semantic change

train_change_models.sh trains SGNS models for both the genuine and shuffled conditions (including shuffling the corpora 10 times) and computing naive and rectified semantic change. Naturally this step is the most time consuming.

Results

Everything else is taken care of in create_results_df.py, including computing the rest of the community features. The exploratory regression analysis is perfored in change-clustering-MarData.ipynb.

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