Date of Award

12-28-2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Information Science

First Advisor

Nitin Agarwal

Abstract

An underexplored aspect of the abundant linguistic data available for computational analysis is the potential for conducting large-scale comparative analyses between different discourses as a more rigorous complement to existing methods. A significant obstacle in comparative studies is the requirement that a researcher distinguish between discursive distinctions that are superficial and those that reflect deeper, structural relationships between the discourses being compared. In this dissertation, I describe two methodologies for comparing discourses in terms of their underlying structures, drawing on distributional semantic models and information theory. These methodologies are explored within three case studies in which the discourses of several online discussion communities are compared. Two of these cases focus on discourses relating to different religious identities, which are particularly prone to the longstanding problems that arise in comparative studies. These studies indicate that the proposed methodologies provide rigorous means for conducting comparative analyses while generating results that are interpretable and therefore useful within different disciplinary contexts.

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