126 Yves Peirsman, Kris Heylen and Dirk Geeraerts
most interesting patterns. The neighbors most typical of islam either refer
to islam-related issues directly (e.g., imam ‘imam’, koran, ‘Quran’), or
have a negative connotation (e.g., achterlijk ‘backward’, fundamentalist
‘fundamentalist (noun)’). The neighbors most typical of christendom, by
contrast, are all of a strictly religious nature (e.g., jodendom ‘Judaism’,
geschrift ‘Scripture’). Again, this shows how Islam is now covered by the
printing press as a political issue, much more so than Christianity.
Table 4. The ten highest climbers in the list of nearest neighbors to islam and
christendom after 9/11 for the document-based model
islam christendomachterlijk ‘backward’
niet-moslim ‘non-muslim (noun)’
ongelovig ‘unreligious’
westers ‘Western’
afvallige ‘backslider’
bedreiging ‘threat’
moslimwereld ‘muslim world’
radicaal ‘radical (adj)’
11 ‘11’
dialoog ‘dialogue’keizer ‘emperor’
jezuïet ‘Jesuit’
vervlechten ‘tie up’
gedoopt ‘baptized’
islam ‘Islam’
pluralisme ‘pluralism’
westers ‘Western (adj)’
godsdienstig ‘religious’
inscriptie ‘incription’
bijbels ‘biblicalSince we do not have any meta-information about the newspaper articles,
the contextual features of the document-based model are far less informa-
tive than those of the syntax-based model. They can only tell us that two
words are similar because they appeared in so many articles together. How-
ever, the document-based models provide us with an interesting tool for
looking into the topical relationship between two issues, like Islam and
terrorism or Islam and culture. As a result, we can measure the relatedness
between different text topics.
In order to find out whether Islam has become more topically related to
terrorism, we do not simply want to measure the distributional similarity
between the two words islam and terrorisme. A more robust approach is to
define the two relevant lexical fields, and to measure the relation between
them. First, we will define the lexical fields of Islam and Christianity on the
one hand, and those of four topics whose relationship with Islam and Chris-
tianity we want to investigate: terrorism, war, religion and culture. Next, we