Over the next months CAMille (ULB-KBR), the Data Science Lab (VUB-KBR), the Digital Research Lab (UGent – KBR), and LabEL (UCLouvain-KBR) will co-organise a three-part series of webinars on Digital Humanities and lexical semantic change.

Lexical semantic change, a phenomenon describing the evolution of the meanings of lexical units, has long preoccupied historical linguists. The possibility to study this phenomenon with computational methods has far reaching implications in several disciplines since diachronic semantic change can be used to identify conceptual shifts in questions related to many aspects of society such as culture, religion, politics, economics and morality. The recent convergence of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics with a range of humanities disciplines has led questions related to lexical semantic change to gain momentum.

During the series, we will hear from three timely projects which are pushing the boundaries of Digital Humanities by creating synergies between disciplines to develop cutting-edge methods to investigate lexical semantic change at a large scale.

Programme

18.10.2022

Nina Tahmasebi (Göteborgs universitet) & Simon Hengchen : “Change is Key!”

Nina Tahmasebi and Simon Hengchen talk about the “Change is Key!” program, a 6-year research program where methods for semantic change and lexical variation are combined to answer research questions stemming from humanities and social sciences

08/11/2022

Justyna Robinson (University of Sussex): Concept-led approach to semantic change.

In this talk Justyna Robinson presents a perspective on semantic change in terms of paradigmatic relations across a text. She discusses the findings from the Linguistic DNA research project which analysed concepts in discourse of 55,000 Early Modern English books. She presents the most recent theoretical and methodological innovations, which include bottom-up modelling of prosodic meaning.

08/12/2022

Florentina Armaselu (University of Luxembourg): “Bridging NLP and LLOD: Humanities Approaches to Semantic Change”.

The talk presents an overview of theoretical aspects, natural language processing (NLP) techniques and linguistic linked open data (LLOD) formalisms that can be considered together for analysing and representing semantic change from a humanistic prespective. It focuses on a project developed as a humanities use case within the COST Action “Nexus Linguarum – European network for Web-centred linguistic data science.”

Practical details:

• When: 18/10/2022, 08/11/2022 and 08/12/2022, from 14h00 to 15h30.
• Where: Online
• Price: Free
• Registration: Registration is mandatory. The morning of the event you will be sent the link to the meeting and the etiquette to follow.
• Link: For more information, see the KBR website