Updates

It’s been a while since I posted here, but I thought it’s time for a small update.

First, I successfully defended my PhD thesis Semantic change in interaction: Studies on the dynamics of lexical meaning in May.

cover: Noah Mease

The thesis is a compilation of 7 papers, which collectively try to answer two questions:

1. How does semantic coordination at the level of interaction relate to lexical change on the community level?
2. Why does word meaning change across time and context?

Of course these are really broad and I’m not trying to give a full definitive answer in the thesis, but the kappa (available at the link above) tries to relate each of the individual papers in the compilation to those big questions.

The kappa also gives background on the theory and methods that are used in the thesis. I tried to make a serious effort to write it in a way that is interesting to people who aren’t in my tiny field. The papers themselves aren’t included in the PDF version of the thesis, but they are all freely available online and are better read in their original conference paper formatting anyway:

• Chapter 7 – What do you mean by negotiation? Annotating social media discussions about word meaning
• Chapter 8 – Classification Systems: Combining taxonomical and perceptual lexical meaning
• Chapter 9 ~ Coordinating taxonomical and observational meaning: The case of genus-differentia definitions.
• Chapter 10 – Describe me an Aucklet: Generating Grounded Perceptual Category Descriptions.
• Chapter 11 – Personae under uncertainty: The case of topoi.
• Chapter 12 – Conditional Language Models for Community-Level Linguistic Variation.
• Chapter 13 – Semantic shift in social networks

I defended my the thesis on April 20th. Casey Kennington was the opponent, and the committee consisted of Hana Filip, Jakub Szymanik, and Dana Dannells. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect culmination to the last several years of research and life, so a big thank you to everyone involved.

❮ ❯

photos: Anastasia Zhikhartseva

Change is Key!

Starting in August of this year I’m working as a researcher in the Change is Key! project, lead by Nina Tahmasebi. Among other things, I’ll be working on datasets and models for fine-grained semantic change detection. I’m really excited to work with the many brilliant people in the CiK project.