KBR Digital Heritage seminar series

Abstract

In this talk, Simon Hencheng and I will present the Change is Key! program, a 6-year research program where we combine methods for semantic change and lexical variation to answer research questions stemming from humanities and social sciences. We will first introduce different classes of methods for computationally detecting semantic change, ranging from topic modelling to contextual embeddings, and discuss how the results should be valued and evaluated. The talk will further shed light on research questions from the humanities and social science focus domains that will be tackled in Change is Key! as well as present a case-study on semantic change in Dutch-language historical newspapers using topic modelling.