arXiv Computation and Language By Thomas Compton

Beyond the Black Box: Integrating Lexical and Semantic Methods in Quantitative Discourse Analysis with BERTopic

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The paper introduces a transparent, hybrid framework for Quantitative Discourse Analysis that blends lexical and semantic techniques. Using custom Python pipelines with NLTK, spaCy, and Sentence Transformers, the authors fine‑tune preprocessing, lemmatisation, and embedding generation, then apply an iterative BERTopic workflow involving UMAP, HDBSCAN, and c‑TF‑IDF to produce coherent topics. The approach is illustrated through a historical political discourse case study, emphasizing code‑level transparency, researcher control, and methodological triangulation.

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