用语义搜索发现18世纪思想史中被忽略的洛克思想隐含影响
Matching Meaning at Scale: Evaluating Semantic Search for 18th-Century Intellectual History through the Case of Locke
- 构建基于语义分类的专家标注体系，评估语义搜索效果
- 语义搜索比词法方法多发现57%的隐含思想传承案例
- 适合研究思想传播、历史文献分析的学者使用
数字化语料库虽已改变思想传播研究，但现有方法主要依赖词汇重复检测，仅能捕捉直接引用，无法识别改写与深层思想关联。本文以洛克的奠基性著作在18世纪的接受为例，通过基于语义分类的专家标注，评估现成语义搜索流程是否能发现词法方法遗漏的意义层面呼应。结果表明，语义搜索显著提升了隐含接受的检出率。然而语言诊断也揭示了‘词汇壁垒’现象：检索仍受表层词汇重合度限制。该研究凸显了语义检索在分析大规模历史文本中思想传播的潜力与局限。数据可在 https://github.com/COMHIS/locke-sim-data 获取。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While digitized corpora have transformed the study of intellectual transmission, current methods rely heavily on lexical text reuse detection, capturing verbatim quotations but fundamentally missing paraphrases and complex implicit engagement. This paper evaluates semantic search in 18th-century intellectual history through the reception of John Locke's foundational work. Using expert annotation grounded in a semantic taxonomy, we examine whether an off-the-shelf semantic search pipeline can surface meaning-level correspondences overlooked by lexical methods. Our results demonstrate that semantic search retrieves substantially more implicit receptions than lexical baselines. However, linguistic diagnostics also reveal a "lexical gatekeeping" effect, where retrieval remains partially constrained by surface vocabulary overlap. These findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of semantic retrieval for analyzing the circulation of ideas in large historical corpora. The data is available at https://github.com/COMHIS/locke-sim-data.
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