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Research Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG) CLCG colloquium

Schedule and speakers 2023

Dates 2023
Speaker & Title of Presentation
Time & Location
17 November

Keynote: Mark Liberman (U. Pennsylvania): Corpus Linguistics in the Modern Age

Ana Guerberof Arenas (RUG)

Andreas van Cranenburgh (RUG): Classification Experiments with the Canon of Dutch Literature
13.00 - 15.00 hrs
A901 in Broerstraat 9
06 October

Keynote: Lauren Hall-Lew (U. Edinburgh): Beyond attitudes and prestige: Why changes-from-below have social meaning

Angela Cristiano (RUG): SHpeaking Neapolitan and speaking Italian: the social meaning of /s/ retraction

Morana Lukač (RUG): At the coal-face of standardization

15.00 - 17.00 hrs
Offerhauszaal

Abstracts

Keynote: Mark Liberman (U. Pennsylvania)

This talk will survey Corpus Linguistics from four perspectives: What, Why, How, and Who?

After a sketch of the past, I will focus on the rapidly changing present, and the promising but uncertain future. Adjacent areas under different names -- Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Human Language Technology -- have experienced decades of exponential growth in computation, networking, and algorithmic power, which allow us to do old things in new ways, and also to explore a wide range of entirely new things.

Across the board, corpus-based research provides large-scale real-world empirical tests for ideas about speech, language, and communication. And these tests are getting easier and faster due to growth in computer performance and the development of new algorithms.

Among the new algorithmic opportunities are the varied and evolving roles of Deep Learning and Large Language Models, often integrated with other models and methods. These techniques are transforming the corpus-based research approaches that we have been using more painfully for half a century, as well as creating new applications in fields as diverse as medicine, education, law, sociology, history, literary studies, and project management.

Andreas van Cranenburgh (RUG)

Why is one novel still read, while another is forgotten? Literary scholars answer that the first is part of the canon, while the other is not. But what determines “canonicity”? Is this purely subjective, or can we partly attribute it to textual features? In this talk I will address these questions with classification experiments based on textual features of novels in a representative corpus.

Last modified:13 November 2023 12.06 p.m.