Words change their meaning over time, depending on a range of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Associating a word’s correct meaning in its historical context is a central challenge in diachronic research, and is relevant to a range of computational linguistics tasks, including information retrieval and semantic search on historical texts. In recent years, computational linguistics research has made great advances in the area of automatic detection of lexical semantic change, using a range of approaches varying from topic models to neural word embeddings.
This workshop builds on the experience of the Workshop on Automatic Detection of Language Change 2018 in Stockholm and the Workshop on lexical semantic change in Helsinki. We wish to foster discussions between Natural Language Processing researchers, (digital) humanists, and historical linguists on this rapidly evolving research area.