Words as Gatekeepers: Measuring Discipline-specific Terms and Meanings in Scholarly Publications

Li Lucy, Jesse Dodge, David Bamman, Katherine Keith


Abstract
Scholarly text is often laden with jargon, or specialized language that can facilitate efficient in-group communication within fields but hinder understanding for out-groups. In this work, we develop and validate an interpretable approach for measuring scholarly jargon from text. Expanding the scope of prior work which focuses on word types, we use word sense induction to also identify words that are widespread but overloaded with different meanings across fields. We then estimate the prevalence of these discipline-specific words and senses across hundreds of subfields, and show that word senses provide a complementary, yet unique view of jargon alongside word types. We demonstrate the utility of our metrics for science of science and computational sociolinguistics by highlighting two key social implications. First, though most fields reduce their use of jargon when writing for general-purpose venues, and some fields (e.g., biological sciences) do so less than others. Second, the direction of correlation between jargon and citation rates varies among fields, but jargon is nearly always negatively correlated with interdisciplinary impact. Broadly, our findings suggest that though multidisciplinary venues intend to cater to more general audiences, some fields’ writing norms may act as barriers rather than bridges, and thus impede the dispersion of scholarly ideas.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.433
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6929–6947
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.433
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.433
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Li Lucy, Jesse Dodge, David Bamman, and Katherine Keith. 2023. Words as Gatekeepers: Measuring Discipline-specific Terms and Meanings in Scholarly Publications. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 6929–6947, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Words as Gatekeepers: Measuring Discipline-specific Terms and Meanings in Scholarly Publications (Lucy et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.433.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.433.mp4