15.06.2023

Learning the Language of the Past: Historical Linguistics, Machine Learning and the detection of loanword adaption and lexical semantic change

Colloquium by Dr. Christin Beck und Dr. Marisa Köllner

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Time: Thursday, 15^th June 2023 at 1pm (sharp)

Location: Rümelinstraße 23, Room 602 or via Zoom

Speaker: Dr. Christin Beck und Dr. Marisa Köllner

Title: Learning the Language of the Past: Historical Linguistics, Machine Learning and the detection of loanword adaption and lexical semantic change

Abstract: 

With the recent advances and success of contextualized language models (LMs) in NLP, there has also been a surge of interest in applying such models for investigations into historical language change. Yet, while these models have been successfully applied to research on lexical semantic change, i.e., changes in word meaning over time, it remains unclear as to how the models can be leveraged for historical linguistic research more broadly, e.g. for loanword adaptation and lexical semantic change.

In this talk, we will give an update on our research in terms of the usability of LMs for historical linguistic research. For one, we will present the background of LMs and their usage in linguistics for investigating lexical semantic change. For another, we will give insights into using language data of different languages stages as learning data to gain more temporal depth and discuss the adaptation of loanwords and lexical semantic change in a historical setting. For this research project, we focused on the German language, for which we rely on different large-scale corpora as training data and well-founded etymological dictionaries to evaluate our findings in the trained language data. For now, we focus on the adaptation of loanwords and lexical semantic change over time, mainly on the changes between Middle High German and New High German. Since this project brought some challenges that have to be solved before answering our research questions, our research is still work in progress, which we aim to complete within the next weeks.
 

We welcome you all to join us in-person or via Zoom.