Tracing the Development of the Virtual Particle Concept Using Semantic Change Detection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Virtual particles are peculiar objects. They figure prominently in much of theoretical and experimental research in elementary particle physics. But exactly what they are is far from obvious. In particular, to what extent they should be considered "real" remains a matter of controversy in philosophy of science. Also their origin and development has only recently come into focus of scholarship in the history of science. In this study, we propose using the intriguing case of virtual particles to discuss the efficacy of Semantic Change Detection (SCD) based on contextualized word embeddings from a domain-adapted BERT model in studying specific scientific concepts. We find that the SCD metrics align well with qualitative research insights in the history and philosophy of science, as well as with the results obtained from Dependency Parsing to determine the frequency and connotations of the term "virtual." Still, the metrics of SCD provide additional insights over and above the qualitative research and the Dependency Parsing. Among other things, the metrics suggest that the concept of the virtual particle became more stable after 1950 but at the same time also more polysemous.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".