Who Does What to Whom? Making Text Parsers Work for Sociological Inquiry

Abstract

Over the past decade, sociologists have become increasingly interested in the formal study of semantic relations within text. Most contemporary studies focus either on mapping concept co-occurrences or on measuring semantic associations via word embeddings. Although conducive to many research goals, these approaches share an important limitation: they abstract away what one can call the event structure of texts, that is, the narrative action that takes place in them. I aim to overcome this limitation by introducing a new framework for extracting semantically rich relations from text that involves three components. First, a semantic grammar structured around textual entities that distinguishes six motif classes: actions of an entity, treatments of an entity, agents acting upon an entity, patients acted upon by an entity, characterizations of an entity, and possessions of an entity; second, a comprehensive set of mapping rules, which make it possible to recover motifs from predictions of dependency parsers; third, an R package that allows researchers to extract motifs from their own texts. The framework is demonstrated in empirical analyses on gendered interaction in novels and constructions of collective identity by U.S. presidential candidates.