Towards Computational Lexical Semantic Change Detection on Towards Computational Lexical Semantic Change Detection

SemEval2020

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0200

We will be organizing a SemEval2020 task on Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection. The task is organised by

Barbara McGillivray (The Alan Turing Institute / University of Cambridge),
Dominik Schlechtweg (University of Stuttgart),
Simon Hengchen (University of Helsinki),
Haim Dubossarsky (University of Cambridge), and
Nina Tahmasebi (University of Gothenburg).

More information soon!

LOT Winter School 2024

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0200

Nina Tahmasebi (University of Gothenburg), together with Haim Dubossarsky, Pierluigi Cassotti, and Francesco Periti will be teaching a course on Computational modeling of semantic change.

During the LOT Winter School two types of courses are on offer: 1. RM1 courses specifically designed for first-year Research Master (RM) students, and 2. Regular courses, which are open to second-year RM students and PhD students. The RM1 courses will only be given in week 1 (January 8-12). Regular courses will be given in both weeks.

The programme offers a wide variety of relevant topics in linguistics, taught by national and international researchers. The levels of the courses range from introductory (RM1 courses) to intermediate and advanced (regular courses).

In addition to the courses, there will be Research Discussion Groups (RDGs) just for PhD students.

(Chat)GPT v BERT: Dawn of Justice for Semantic Change Detection

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100

EMNLP 2023

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

ChiWUG: A Graph-based Evaluation Dataset for Chinese Lexical Semantic Change Detection

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Incremental Semantic Shift Detection

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 2nd Edition

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Nodalida 2023

Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Svenska Språkets Historia

Fri, 12 May 2023 09:00:00 +0200

Språk förändras över tid. Ofta är dessa förändringar signifikanta för mycket mer än bara vårt språk, de pekar också på hur samhällen och kulturer förändras. Genom den revolution vi har sett de senaste två årtiondena i form av stora mängder tillgängliga digitala texter, och datorkraft nog att handskas med dessa volymer av text, kan vi nu studera språkliga, kulturella och samhälleliga förändringar. Med hjälp av datorer kan vi studera förändringar över långa tidsperioder och olika typer av genrer. Vi kan undersöka hur olika språk lånar av, påverkar, och samverkar med varandra.

I denna plenarföreläsning kommer jag att ge en översikt över språkteknologin och dess möjligheter att handskas med språkförändringar på ett automatiskt vis. Jag kommer att diskutera nuvarande och framtida möjligheter, samt begränsningar, när vi tillämpar språkteknologi på stora mängder text. Vad är neurala nätverk och vad innebär denna metodrevolution när det gäller vår förmåga att hitta och tolka språkförändringar? Vilka nya möjligheter finns det nu och vilka tror vi kommer finnas i framtiden?

Därefter kommer jag att presentera vårt 6-åriga forskningsprogram Change is Key!, finansierat av RJ, där vi använder oss av toppmoderna språkteknologiska verktyg för att studera text i stor skala. Med hjälp av dessa metoder kommer vi att studera samhälls- och kulturförändringar, bl a inom litteraturvetenskap, analytisk sociologi, genusvetenskap och, i samarbete med ett annat forskningsprojekt, idéhistoria. Jag kommer att ge en överblick av våra delprojekt, och de möjligheter och stora utmaningar vi har framför oss. Som exempel kommer jag att beskriva våra praktiska erfarenheter från vårt arbete med Marknadens språk, och hur språkteknologiska verktyg kan användas för att bidra till kvalitativ forskning. Till sist ger jag min bild av hur långt vi kan komma med digitala verktyg när det gäller kvalitativ textforskning.

KBR Digital Heritage seminar series

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 14:00:00 +0200

Image borrowed from KBR.

LSCDiscovery: A shared task on semantic change discovery and detection in Spanish

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0200

DiaWUG: A Dataset for Diatopic Lexical Semantic Variation in Spanish

Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200

3rd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2022 (LChange'22)

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 09:30:00 +0100

The workshop builds upon its first iteration in 2019, and the second edition in 20121. It will be colocated with ACL 2022 in Dublin , Ireland, as a hybrid event. The workshop dates are not yet fixed but will be on May 26-28, or possibly both dates. This year, LChange will feature a shared task on semantic change detection for Spanish as one track of the workshop. We hope to make this third edition another resounding success!

The call for papers will be similar to last time: all aspects around computational approaches to historical language change with the focus on digital text corpora. If you have published in the field previously, and are inrerested in helping out in the PC to review papers, send us an email. LChange'19 resulted in a book on Computational approaches to semantic change, and this year, we are considering a special issue journal for invited workshop papers.

Important Dates

Feb. 28, 2022: Paper submission
March 26, 2022: Notification of acceptance
April 10, 2022: Camera-ready papers due
May 26-28, 2022: Workshop date (days will be decided upon later)

Workshop Topics

This workshop explores state-of-the-art computational methodologies, theories and digital text resources on exploring the time-varying nature of human language.

The aim of this workshop is three-fold. First, we want to provide pioneering researchers who work on computational methods, evaluation, and large-scale modelling of language change an outlet for disseminating cutting-edge research on topics concerning language change. We want to utilize this proposed workshop as a platform for sharing state-of-the-art research progress in this fundamental domain of natural language research.

Second, in doing so we want to bring together domain experts across disciplines. by connecting researchers in historical linguistics with those that develop and test computational methods for detecting semantic change and laws of semantic change; and those that need knowledge (of the occurrence and shape) of language change, for example, in digital humanities and computational social sciences where text mining is applied to diachronic corpora subject to e.g., lexical semantic change.

Third, the detection and modelling of language change using diachronic text and text mining raise undamental theoretical and methodological challenges for future research.

Besides these goals, this workshop will also support discussion on the evaluation of computational methodologies for uncovering language change. SemEval2020 Task1 on unsupervised detection of lexical semantic change attracted three figure submission numbers and a total of 21 submitted system papers. Since then, two more tasks have been completed, and we will organize the shared task on Spanish as a part of this workshop.

We invite original research papers from a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

Novel methods for detecting diachronic semantic change and lexical replacement
Automatic discovery and quantitative evaluation of laws of language change
Computational theories and generative models of language change
Sense-aware (semantic) change analysis
Diachronic word sense disambiguation
Novel methods for diachronic analysis of low-resource languages
Novel methods for diachronic linguistic data visualization
Novel applications and implications of language change detection
Quantification of sociocultural influences on language change
Cross-linguistic, phylogenetic, and developmental approaches to language change
Novel datasets for cross-linguistic and diachronic analyses of language

Shared Task

The task will have two subtasks organized in two phases respectively:

discovery, and
binary change detection (detection of sense gain or loss vs. neither).

Note that discovery introduces additional difficulties for models as compared to the more simple semantic change detection, e.g. because a large number of predictions is required and the target words are not preselected, balanced or cleaned. Yet, discovery is an important task, with applications such as lexicography where dictionary makers aim to cover the full vocabulary of a language.

The full task description will be published on CodaLab with a short description on the workshop web page.

Task organizers: Frank D. Zamora-Reina, Felipe Bravo-Marquez, Dominik Schlechtweg.

Keynote Talks

To be announced

Submissions

We accept three types of submissions, long and short papers, following the ACL2022 style, and the ACL submission policy, and shared task papers.

Details on paper length and submission proceedure will be posted once released by ACL2022.

The workshop is planned to last two full days. Submissions are open to all, and are to be submitted anonymously. Workshop papers will be refereed through a double-blind peer review process by at least three reviewers with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organizers. Shared task participants can choose to submit their papers to the shared task where papers will be reviewed by other task participants, or to the main workshop where they will be reviewed according to the normal workshop proceedure.

Contact

Organisers: Nina Tahmasebi, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen, Syrielle Montariol, and Haim Dubossarsky.

Anti-Harassment Policy

Our workshop highly values the open exchange of ideas, the freedom of thought and expression, and respectful scientific debate. We support and uphold the ACL Anti-Harassment policy, and any workshop participant should feel free to contact any of the workshop organisers or Priscilla Rasmussen, in case of any issues.

References:

Simon Hengchen, Nina Tahmasebi, Dominik Schlechtweg, Haim Dubossarsky. Challenges for Computational Lexical Semantic Change. Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen (eds). Computational Approaches to Semantic Change. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Nina Tahmasebi, Adam Jatowt, Lars Borin. Survey of Computational Approaches to Lexical Semantic Change Detection. Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen (eds). Computational Approaches to Semantic Change. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Baayen, R. Harald. 2001. Word Frequency Distributions. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Koplenig, Alexander. 2015. The Impact of Lacking Metadata for the Measurement of Cultural and Linguistic Change Using the Google Ngram Data Sets—Reconstructing the Composition of the German Corpus in Times of WWII. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities fqv037. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv037.
Koplenig, Alexander, Sascha Wolfer & Carolin Müller-Spitzer. 2019. Studying Lexical Dynamics and Language Change via Generalized Entropies: The Problem of Sample Size. Entropy 21(5). https://doi.org/10.3390/e21050464. http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/5/464.
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change (Language in Society 20). Oxford, UK ; Cambridge [Mass.]: Blackwell.
Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Verses, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, et al. 2010. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books (Supporting Online Material II). Science 331(14). http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176/suppl/DC1 (5 March, 2014).
Pechenick, Eitan Adam, Christopher M. Danforth & Peter Sheridan Dodds. 2015. Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution. (Ed.) Alain Barrat. PLOS ONE 10(10). e0137041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137041.
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2016. About text frequencies in historical linguistics: Disentangling environmental and grammatical change. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12(1). 153–171. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2015-0068.

DWUG: A large Resource of Diachronic Word Usage Graphs in Four Languages

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Computational approaches to semantic change

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0200