Diachronic Natural Language Processing
by
Asst. Prof. Aykut Koç
Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent
UMRAM, Bilkent
Date/Time: Friday, March 4th, 2022, at 3:40PM
Place: EE-517
Abstract: Languages evolve with time since cultural and linguistic effects alter meanings of words. Diachronic study of semantic change explores changes in word meanings. Semantic change comes in fast- or slow-paced natures. A contemporary example of fast changes is the word corona after the 2020 Worldwide Covid pandemic. Once stood for a circle or disc in astronomy, corona’s dominant sense has oriented towards its disease-related sense in the perspective of society. Identifying and categorizing these alterations can allow language models to detect current cultural impacts and trends.
Recent years have witnessed a surge of computational approaches for the detection and characterization of lexical semantic change (LSC) due to the availability of diachronic corpora and advancing word representation techniques. By comparing word embeddings trained over historical corpora, one can demonstrate not only qualitative aspects of semantic change but also attain quantitative results. In this talk, we present a treatment of diachronic natural language processing in the context of semantic changes, the main methodology and methods used in computational semantic change detection, and present some state-of-the-art results.
Bio: Dr. Koç received the B.S. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2005 and then moved to Stanford University, CA, USA for graduate studies. He obtained the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2007, the M.S. degree in management science and engineering in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2011, all from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. He also holds a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree in Law from the Faculty of Law, Ankara University, Turkey. He founded and served as the manager of Artificial Intelligence and Information Technologies Research Program Dept. of ASELSAN Research Center. In August 2019, Dr. Koç joined Bilkent University as a faculty member.