  When performing a conceptual analysis of a concept, philosophers are
interested in all forms of expression of a concept in a text---be it direct or
indirect, explicit or implicit. In this paper, we experiment with topic-based
methods of automating the detection of concept expressions in order to
facilitate philosophical conceptual analysis. We propose six methods based on
LDA, and evaluate them on a new corpus of court decision that we had annotated
by experts and non-experts. Our results indicate that these methods can yield
important improvements over the keyword heuristic, which is often used as a
concept detection heuristic in many contexts. While more work remains to be
done, this indicates that detecting concepts through topics can serve as a
general-purpose method for at least some forms of concept expression that are
not captured using naive keyword approaches.
