Extensional Mapping-Chains for Studying Concept Drift in Political Ontologies.

Large data sets of coded textual content are required to answer many research questions in Communication Science. These data sets are often comprised of textual content from different time periods or genres, and are often coded by different teams at different moments. In order to combine different datasets for a larger scale analysis, codebook merging is necessary. One important issue is normally ignored, that is, concept drift over time. This paper proposes a technique to utilise extensional mapping to alleviate the problems of codebook merging and topic drift. We compare the intensional and extensional mappings as well as investigate the mapping chains over time. This initial research shows the potential of the associative character of extensional mapping-chains and open a promising direction for communication science research. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]