Computational approaches to semantic change
About this ebook
Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans.
A major challenge presently is to integrate the hard-earned knowledge and expertise of traditional historical linguistics with cutting-edge methodology explored primarily in computational linguistics.
The idea for the present volume came out of a concrete response to this challenge. The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (LChange'19), at ACL 2019, brought together scholars from both fields.
This volume offers a survey of this exciting new direction in the study of semantic change, a discussion of the many remaining challenges that we face in pursuing it, and considerably updated and extended versions of a selection of the contributions to the LChange'19 workshop, addressing both more theoretical problems — e.g., discovery of "laws of semantic change" — and practical applications, such as information retrieval in longitudinal text archives.
About the author
Nina Tahmasebi is an associate professor in NLP at Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg. She holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Hanover and L3S Research Center, and a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Chalmers University of Technology.
She has been conducting research on all aspects of computational lexical semantic change since 2008 – from developing theory, methods, evaluation techniques, to creating resources. In addition, Nina also studies related problems in NLP, such as disseminating computational models of language for text mining and Digital Humanities. She takes a particular interest in ensuring that answers found from large-scale text are an accurate representation of the underlying information stored in the text.
Lars Borin is professor of natural language processing at the University of Gothenburg, with a background in comparative Slavic and Finno-Ugric linguistics and in computation. His research interests include studying computational lexical semantics from a cross-linguistic perspective, developing and applying computational linguistic methods to problems of historical-comparative, typological and areal linguistics, and language-centered digital humanities.
Adam Jatowt is a Professor at the Computer Science department of the University of Innsbruck. He is also affiliated with the Digital Science Center at the University of Innsbruck. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 2005 and has worked as an Assistant and Associate Professor at Kyoto University. His research interests include broad topics in natural language processing, information retrieval, digital humanities and digital libraries. Adam has published over 150 research papers in international conferences and journals. He is on the editorial board of IP&M, JASIST, IJDL, JIIS and IEEE JSC journals.
Yang Xu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Toronto. He obtained his BA/MEng from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University. He took a postdoctoral position in the epartment of Linguistics at University of California, Berkeley. His current research intersects language, computation, and cognition, with an emphasis on understanding the time-varying nature of the human lexicon.
Simon Hengchen (1988) holds master’s degrees in Germanic languages and in Information Science from the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), where he also obtained a PhD in Information Science. His research focusses on computational approaches to lexical semantic change. After a postdoc in a computational history group in Helsinki, Simon is currently employed at Göteborgs Universitet (Sweden) as a researcher and at the Université de Genève (Switzerland) as a lecturer.
