Talk on Tuesday Mar 28, 2023 at 12:30 Place: Zoom Seminar Title: Computational methods to analyse lexical semantic change and variation from historical texts: my experience so far Speaker: Barbara McGillivray, King's College London Abstract: <p style="margin-left:0cm; margin-right:0cm; text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12pt"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Over time, new words enter the language, others become obsolete, and existing words acquire new meanings. These phenomena are grounded in a fascinatingly complex mix of cognitive, social, and contextual factors, responding to language contact, emerging circumstances, cultural and socio-political changes, stylistic choices, and different communicative needs. The past decade has seen a growing interest in automatic methods for semantic change (i.e. meaning change) detection from large corpus data, which have made it possible to conduct quantitative studies aimed at detecting broad patterns in the data. Most of these automatic detection methods rely on distributional semantics methods and trace th e computational representation of a corpus-driven word’s semantic profile (via vector embeddings) over time to identify if and when a potential change in the semantic profile may have occurred. In this talk I will present my research on developing computational models for semantic change detection in historical texts, particularly on ancient Greek and Latin. </span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-left:0cm; margin-right:0cm; text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12pt"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="color:black">McGillivray, B.</span></span></span><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="color:black"> et al</span></span></span><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="color:black">. (2019). A computational approach to lexical polysemy in Ancient Greek, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 34: 4.</span></span></span></span></span ></p> <p style="margin-left:0cm; margin-right:0cm; text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12pt"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="color:black">McGillivray, B</span></span></span><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="color:black">. et al. </span></span></span><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="color:black">(2022). A new corpus annotation framework for Latin diachronic lexical semantics. <span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">J</span> .</span></span></span> <span style="font-size:11.0pt"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="color:black">Latin Linguistics, vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 47-105.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-left:0cm; margin-right:0cm; text-align:justify">Talk will be broadcasted at:</p> <p style="margin-left:0cm; margin-right:0cm"><span style="font-size:12pt"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88466865139?pwd=VnFwZXBxZUdHRUpUVkJTM2FVSXc2Zz09</span></span></p>; Url event:https://ifisc.uib-csic.es/en/events/seminars/computational-methods-to-analys...