Lexicons of Key Terms in Scholarly Texts and Their Disciplinary Differences: From Quantum Semantics Construction to Relative-Entropy-Based Comparisons

Abstract

Complex networks are often used to analyze written text and reports by rendering texts in the form of a semantic network, forming a lexicon of words or key terms. Many existing methods to construct lexicons are based on counting word co-occurrences, having the advantage of simplicity and ease of applicability. Here, we use a quantum semantics approach to generalize such methods, allowing us to model the entanglement of terms and words. We show how quantum semantics can be applied to reveal disciplinary differences in the use of key terms by analyzing 12 scholarly texts that represent the different positions of various disciplinary schools (of conceptual change research) on the same topic (conceptual change). In addition, attention is paid to how closely the lexicons corresponding to different positions can be brought into agreement by suitable tuning of the entanglement factors. In comparing the lexicons, we invoke complex network-based analysis based on exponential matrix transformation and use information theoretic relative entropy (Jensen–Shannon divergence) as the operationalization of differences between lexicons. The results suggest that quantum semantics is a viable way to model the disciplinary differences of lexicons and how they can be tuned for a better agreement.