Dr. Barbara McGillivray, Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and at The Alan Turing Institute will give a presentation during the CAII Seminar Series on Monday, February 22 at 10:00 a.m. The talk is titled “Computational Models of Meaning Change.”
View Seminar here: https://go.ncsa.illinois.edu/CAIISpringSemesterSeriesSP21
Abstract: Over time, new words enter the language, others become obsolete, and existing words acquire new meanings. In Old English thing meant ‘a public assembly’ and now means more generally ‘entity’; chill originally meant ‘to cool’ and has metaphorically been extended to ‘to relax’. The recent digitization efforts have now made it possible to access and mine large digital collections of historical texts using automatic methods and investigate the question of semantic change at an unprecedented scale. In this seminar I will present my research on developing computational models for semantic change in historical texts, aiming to teach computers to identify such change automatically. I will share my experience of working on Ancient Greek and on large datasets of contemporary English, and will discuss the challenges and opportunities of working in interdisciplinary projects in Data Science, Digital Humanities and Computational Linguistics.
Speaker Bio:
Barbara McGillivray is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge and at The Alan Turing Institute, where she runs the Humanities and Data Science special interest group. She holds a degree in Mathematics and one in Classics from the University of Firenze (Italy), and a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Pisa (2010). Before joining the Turing and Cambridge she worked as a language technologist in the Dictionaries division of Oxford University Press and as a data scientist in the Open Research Group of Springer Nature.
All presentations will be recorded and will be available on the CAII website shortly after the presentation.
