32.2769, Books: Computational approaches to semantic change: Tahmasebi, Borin, Jatowt, Xu, Hengchen (eds.)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2769. Mon Aug 30 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2769, Books: Computational approaches to semantic change: Tahmasebi, Borin, Jatowt, Xu, Hengchen (eds.)

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Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2021 10:25:12
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [Sebastian.Nordhoff at langsci-press.org]
Subject: Computational approaches to semantic change: Tahmasebi, Borin, Jatowt, Xu, Hengchen (eds.)

 


Title: Computational approaches to semantic change 
Series Title: Language Variation  

Publication Year: 2021 
Publisher: Language Science Press
	   http://langsci-press.org
	

Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/303 


Editor: Nina Tahmasebi
Editor: Lars Borin
Editor: Adam Jatowt
Editor: Yang Xu
Editor: Simon Hengchen

Electronic: ISBN:  9783961103126 Pages: 396 Price: Europe EURO 0 Comment: Open Access


Abstract:

Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied
scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and
early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of
language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is
the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed
steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century,
encompassing many languages and language families.

Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as
research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in
computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still
tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent
years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical
quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by
enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic
corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional
manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly
data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden
opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and
short time spans.

A major challenge presently is to integrate the hard-earned knowledge and
expertise of traditional historical linguistics with cutting-edge methodology
explored primarily in computational linguistics.

The idea for the present volume came out of a concrete response to this
challenge. The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to
Historical Language Change (LChange'19), at ACL 2019, brought together
scholars from both fields.

This volume offers a survey of this exciting new direction in the study of
semantic change, a discussion of the many remaining challenges that we face in
pursuing it, and considerably updated and extended versions of a selection of
the contributions to the LChange'19 workshop, addressing both more theoretical
problems — e.g., discovery of "laws of semantic change" — and practical
applications, such as information retrieval in longitudinal text archives.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Historical Linguistics
                     Semantics


Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=156233




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