36.3225, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: Advances in Data-driven Research on Lexical and Semantic Change (Germany)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3225. Fri Oct 24 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3225, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: Advances in Data-driven Research on Lexical and Semantic Change (Germany)

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Date: 22-Oct-2025
From: Stefano De Pascale [stefano.depascale at kuleuven.be]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2026: Advances in Data-driven Research on Lexical and Semantic Change


Workshop at SLE 2026: Advances in Data-driven Research on Lexical and
Semantic Change
Short Title: SLE 2026

Date: 26-Aug-2026 - 29-Aug-2026
Location: Osnabrück, Germany
Meeting URL: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2026/list-of-workshops/

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Historical
Linguistics; Semantics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 18-Nov-2025

Workshop title: Advances in data-driven research on lexical and
semantic change
Key words: lexical semantics, diachrony, historical linguistics,
natural language processing, corpus-based techniques, computational
semantics
Convenors: Stefano De Pascale (KU Leuven / Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
& Haim Dubossarsky (Queen Mary University London)
Call for Abstracts: we invite submissions for a workshop on “Advances
in data-driven research on lexical and semantic change”, to be held as
part of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
(SLE 2026), which will take place at Osnabrück University, 26–29
August 2026.
Submission Guidelines:
Please send a provisional abstract of no more than 300 words
(excluding references) to both convenors
(stefano.depascale at kuleuven.be and h.dubossarsky at qmul.uk) by November
18, 2025. Abstracts should clearly outline the research question,
data, methods, and, possibly, main findings.
If the workshop proposal is accepted by the SLE Scientific Committee,
authors of accepted provisional abstracts will be invited to submit a
full abstract via EasyChair by January 15, 2026.
Important Dates:
 - 18 November 2025 – Deadline for submitting provisional abstracts
 - 15 December 2025 – Notification of acceptance/rejection of workshop
proposals by SLE
 - 15 January 2026 – Deadline for submitting full abstracts via
EasyChair
 - 31 March 2026 – Notification of acceptance/rejection of abstracts
Workshop Description:
Over the past decade, the study of lexical and semantic change has
attracted attention by research groups across disciplines. Historical
linguists, computational semanticists, corpus linguists, lexical
typologists, and cognitive scientists increasingly share data,
methods, and theoretical frameworks that have contributed to vibrant
progress in this domain. The aim of this workshop is to bring together
the latest research of these communities on data-driven approaches to
lexical and semantic change, with a particular focus on tackling
theoretically grounded research questions.
We observe three methodological developments that are already driving
the convergence and cooperation among research traditions, and are
likely to make a lasting impact on the study of lexical and semantic
change. First, the large-scale digitization of historical archives has
dramatically expanded access to textual data, with projects such as
Impresso (2025) for Swiss and Luxemburgish newspapers, Delpher for
Dutch, and Gallica for French. Second, advances in distributional
semantics and NLP (Gemma Team et al. 2024; Grattafiori et al. 2024)
have enabled scholars to model meaning variation across diverse
historical corpora. Third, large-scale lexical databases (Rzymski et
al. 2020; Carling et al. 2023; Dehouck et al. 2023; Bocklage et al.
2024) provide shared infrastructures for crosslinguistic and
diachronic research.
In comparative lexical semantics, exemplified by the work on
colexification (François 2008), the wealth of databases and machine
learning tools has already been exploited for large-scale and
crosslinguistic studies in semantic change (Brochhagen et al. 2023;
Xu, Malt & Srinivasan 2017; Xu et al. 2020). In this interdisciplinary
strand of work, the explicit goal is to find higher-order patterns of
language change. Synchronic and diachronic datasets are linked in
complex and innovative way, and analyzed through advanced
computational modelling. This has brought to light, among others, the
commonalities between children’s semantic extension in language
development, or salient cognitive mechanisms, such as affect and
conceptual associativity, with the world-wide diversity of
lexicalization strategies of concepts .
In historical linguistics, on the other hand, an extensive literature
exists on the importance of prototypes, analogy, metonymical and
metaphorical relations as drivers of semantic shifts ( Geeraerts 1997;
Traugott & Dasher 2001; Juvonen & Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2016).
Corpus-driven historical semantics has often favored individual, but
more in-depth case studies (Fonteyn & Manjavacas 2021), where
annotation at the token-level of individual and contextualized
occurrences is much more common (Geeraerts et al. 2024).
Topics and Research Questions:
Building on these points this workshop seeks to connect data-driven
methodologies with foundational questions in lexical and semantic
change. We welcome contributions on:
 - Computational and corpus-based modeling of lexical and semantic
change;
 - Quantitative analyses of analogy, reanalysis, or polysemy;
 - Cross-linguistic and phylogenetic studies of colexification;
 - Integration of NLP, typological, and cognitive evidence.
We invite contributions that address the following interconnected
issues, which together define a shared research agenda across
historical linguistics, typology, corpus studies, cognitive semantics,
and computational modeling. The following are examples questions, and
by no means an exhaustive list:
1. From data points to meaning dynamics
The growing availability of multilingual corpora and lexical databases
enables us to trace meaning variation across thousands of words and
languages. Yet large-scale methods often overlook the fine-grained
distinctions that emerge in specific contexts, while qualitative
studies rarely scale beyond individual case studies.
How can corpus-based and computational approaches be combined to
bridge these levels of analysis? What token-level properties of
meaning, such as prototypical versus peripheral uses, can be captured
using broad datasets? Conversely, how can higher-level semantic
categories such as affect or aspect be made operational for annotating
individual word uses?
2. Rethinking the mechanism of semantic change
Traditional classifications (specialization, generalization, metaphor,
metonymy, pejoration, amelioration) remain the foundation of
historical semantics. Though long unchallenged, recent corpus-based
research (Ceuppens & De Smet 2025) and computational studies
(Cassotti, De Pascale & Tahmasebi 2024) have begun to reassess these
mechanisms and their interactions.Do these classical distinctions
still capture the main forces of lexical change, or should we redefine
them in light of quantitative evidence? Are there mechanisms
overlooked by earlier theory, such as (literal) similarity-based
change? And how can NLP tools help evaluate or refine the descriptive
framework inherited from traditional semantics?
3. Connecting the lexicon’s two perspectives on change
Meaning change operates both semasiologically (a word’s senses
diversify or narrow) and onomasiologically (concepts are re-labeled or
reorganized). The corpus-based integration of these two perspectives
is now enjoying active exploration (De Smet 2019; Cai & De Smet 2024;
Geeraerts et al. 2024), but the full breadth of this interaction still
awaits thorough examination.
Can large-scale data link changes in word meaning with changes in
lexical organization across languages? Do processes like borrowing or
word formation correlate systematically with particular semantic
drifts, and how might typological diversity shape these interactions?
4. Making meaning change measurable
Annotation frameworks for syntax and morphology are well developed,
but semantic change still lacks standardized, reproducible measures
(Van de Velde & Petré 2020). Advances in distributional semantics and
large language models create new opportunities, but also raise issues
of interpretability and reproducibility (Karjus 2025).
How can historical linguistics and NLP jointly develop transparent
procedures for quantifying semantic change? Can LLM-based annotation
complement manual approaches without obscuring linguistic
interpretability?
5. Language systems and their cultural environments
Historical corpora encode not just linguistic structure but also the
sociocultural contexts of communication: ideologies, practices, and
topical interests. These contexts influence how meanings shift, yet
teasing apart linguistic from social dynamics remains difficult.
Which interdisciplinary strategies (quantitative baselines, contextual
annotation, or comparative modeling) best help separate
system-internal trends from socially contingent variation? How might
sociolinguistic modeling clarify the balance between semantic
innovation and pragmatic adaptation?
6. The time depth of modern models
Transformer-based language models trained on contemporary text are
increasingly used for diachronic analysis, yet they may project
present-day biases onto historical materials (Manjavacas & Fonteyn
2022).
How can computational linguists and digital humanists quantify and
mitigate such temporal bias? Does it distort certain semantic domains
more than others, and how can domain adaptation or calibration ensure
that models trained today remain faithful to past language states?
References:
Bocklage, Katja, Anna Di Natale, Annika Tjuka & Johann-Mattis List
(2024): Representing the Database of Semantic Shifts by Zalizniak et
al. from 2024 in Cross-Linguistic Data Formats. Application/pdf
University of Passau. doi:10.15475/CALCIP.2024.1.4.
Brochhagen, Thomas, Gemma Boleda, Eleonora Gualdoni & Yang Xu (2023):
>From language development to language evolution: A unified view of
human lexical creativity. Science 381(6656). 431–436.
doi:10.1126/science.ade7981.
Cai, Yingying & Hendrik De Smet (2024): Are categories’ cores more
isomorphic than their peripheries? Frontiers in Communication Volume
9-2024 doi:10.3389/fcomm.2024.1310234.
Carling, Gerd, Sandra Cronhamn, Olof Lundgren, Victor Bogren Svensson
& Johan Frid (2023): The evolution of lexical semantics dynamics,
directionality, and drift. Frontiers in Communication 8. 1126249.
doi:10.3389/fcomm.2023.1126249.
Cassotti, Pierluigi, Stefano De Pascale & Nina Tahmasebi (2024): Using
Synchronic Definitions and Semantic Relations to Classify Semantic
Change Types. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers),
4539–4553. Bangkok, Thailand: Association for Computational
Linguistics. doi:10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.249.
Ceuppens, Hilke & Hendrik De Smet (2025): When does semantic change
lead to semantic loss? Metaphor vs inference-driven metonymy. Journal
of Historical Linguistics. John Benjamins Publishing.
Dehouck, Mathieu, Alex François, Siva Kalyan, Martial Pastor & David
Kletz (2023): EvoSem: A database of polysemous cognate sets.
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to
Historical Language Change, 66–75. Singapore: Association for
Computational Linguistics. doi:10.18653/v1/2023.lchange-1.7.
Fonteyn, Lauren & Enrique Manjavacas (2021): Adjusting scope: a
computational approach to case-driven research on semantic change.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Humanities Research (CHR
2021) (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), vol. 2898, 280–298. Amsterdam.
François, Alexandre (2008): Semantic maps and the typology of
colexification: Intertwining polysemous networks across languages. In
Martine Vanhove (Hrsg.), Studies in Language Companion Series, vol.
106, 163–215. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
doi:10.1075/slcs.106.09fra.
Geeraerts, Dirk (1997): Diachronic prototype semantics. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Dirk Speelman, Kris Heylen, Mariana Montes, Stefano
De Pascale, Karlien Franco & Michael Lang (2024): Lexical Variation
and Change: A Distributional Semantic Approach. Oxford University
Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198890676.001.0001.
Karjus, Andres (2025): Machine-assisted quantitizing designs:
augmenting humanities and social sciences with artificial
intelligence. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12(1).
277. doi:10.1057/s41599-025-04503-w.
Juvonen, Päivi & Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (Hrsg.) (2016): The Lexical
Typology of Semantic Shifts. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
doi:doi:10.1515/9783110377675.
Manjavacas, Enrique & Lauren Fonteyn (2022): Non-Parametric Word Sense
Disambiguation for Historical Languages. In Mika Hämäläinen, Khalid
Alnajjar, Niko Partanen & Jack Rueter (Hrsg.), Proceedings of the 2nd
International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital
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Rzymski, Christoph, Tiago Tresoldi, Simon J. Greenhill, Mei-Shin Wu,
Nathanael E. Schweikhard, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Volker Gast, et al.
(2020): The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications, reproducible
analysis of cross-linguistic polysemies. Scientific Data 7(1). 13.
doi:10.1038/s41597-019-0341-x.
Smet, Hendrik De (2019): The motivated unmotivated: Variation,
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Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher (2001): Regularity in
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