Change is Key! is a research program in which we aim to create computational tools to turn text into a story of both our language, our societies and culture and how these have changed over time.

Firstly, we will develop corpus-based methods for detecting semantic change (over time) and variation (across social groups and media types). This will create general tools for the study and detection of language change at large-scale and directly benefit historical linguistics and lexicography. Secondly, in collaboration with researchers from each field, we aim to answer research questions in social sciences, gender studies, and literary studies.

The program spans six years (2022 - 2027) with a total of 11 researchers, one research engineer and six partner universities.

In 2023, we will co-organize the fourth edition of International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, (LChange'23) that will be co-located with EMNLP'23. In 2024, we will co-organize the first workshop edition of Large-scale computational approaches to evolution and change at Evolang XV.

This research program is funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond under reference number M21-0021 for a total of 33.5 Million SEK.

News

 
 
 
 
 
Andres Karjus is visiting us
Change is Key!
October 2023 – October 2023 Gothenburg, Sweden
We are happy and excited to announce that Andres Karjus is visting us. Andres works on language and culture dynamics, using large corpora, machine learning & AI, and cognitive experiments. Recently he has been also working on, through various collaborations, on art history and creative industries, and advising collaborative projects between academia and the public and private sectors. He is affiliated as a research fellow at the CUDAN Cultural Data Analytics lab at Tallinn University, and at the Estonian Business School. He did his PhD at the Centre for Language Evolution of the University of Edinburgh, on lexical dynamics and communicative need in language.
 
 
 
 
 
2nd Consortium Meeting Change is key!
October 2023 – October 2023 KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Our second consortium meeting will be held at KU Leuven on October 16-17. On the afternoon of the 16th, we will live stream presentations on ongoing work in the Change is Key! Program. Feel free to join us onsite, or online. Contact us for a link to the event at info@changeiskey.org.
 
 
 
 
 
LOT Winter School 2024
January 2024 – January 2024 Tilburg University, Netherlands.

We are giving a course at the LOT Winter School 2024. We are offering a hands-on advanced course open to second-year RM students and PhD students on the topic of computational modeling on semantic change.

The programme offers a wide variety of relevant topics in linguistics, taught by national and international researchers. The levels of the courses range from introductory (RM1 courses) to intermediate and advanced (regular courses). More details on winterschool wepage: https://lotschool.nl/events/lot-winter-school-2024/

Recent Posts

Recent Publications

(2023). Studying Word Meaning Evolution through Incremental Semantic Shift Detection: A Case Study of Italian ParliamentarySpeeches. Studying Word Meaning Evolution through Incremental Semantic Shift Detection.

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(2023). XL-LEXEME: WiC Pretrained Model for Cross-Lingual LEXical sEMantic changE. XL-LEXEME.

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(2023). Human and Computational Measurement of Lexical Semantic Change. University of Stuttgart.

(2023). A Survey on Contextualised Semantic Shift Detection. Survey of Contextualized Semantic Shift Detection.

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(2023). Computational modeling of semantic change. Computational modeling of semantic change.

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(2023). The Finer They Get: Combining Fine-Tuned Models For Better Semantic Change Detection. The Finer They Get.

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(2022). DiaWUG: A Dataset for Diatopic Lexical Semantic Variation in Spanish. DiaWUG.

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(2021). LSCDiscovery: A shared task on semantic change discovery and detection in Spanish. LSCDiscovery.

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(2021). Survey of computational approaches to lexical semantic change detection . Survey of semantic change.

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