Modelling semantic change from Ancient Greek to emoji

Over time, new words enter the language, others become obsolete, and existing words acquire new meanings. The recent digitization efforts have now made it possible to access and mine digital collections of historical texts using automatic methods and investigate the question of semantic change over centuries. Easy access to very large born-digital collections from the web also allows us to study changes in contemporary language data spanning short time periods. In this talk I will present my research on developing models for semantic change drawing on state-of-the-art computational linguistics methods relying on distributional semantics principles, Bayesian learning and embedding technologies. I will share my experience of working at different scales and in a range of interdisciplinary projects, from Ancient Greek and Latin to Charles Darwin’s letters, web archives, Twitter and emoji.