Digital Classicist London Seminar 2020

Institute of Classical Studies

Harry Tanner (Galway) In Search of a Digital Metal Detector for Ancient Language Lexicography: a Case Study on Greek

Friday July 10th at 17:30 (UK time)

Streamed live (and archived indefinitely) at https://youtu.be/EF1LDSePIIg

Word meaning shifts subtly all the time. Tracking these shifts in Greek is a crucial endeavour for ancient language lexicography, which usually provides little in the way of a diachronic picture of word shift. But how can we map expert labelling of word senses change onto computational models? Here, I will present an overview of the word embeddings approach to using neural networks to track word meaning shift, with an evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses. I will also present a means of evaluating both present and future computational models using numerical scoring from expert labelling. I will evaluate a run of the mill Word2Vec model on the ancient Greek BCE corpus, finding that it tracks low-level drift very well and higher level drift moderately well; I will conclude with some future directions for research.

ALL WELCOME