The workshop builds upon its first iteration in 2019, and the second edition in 20121. It will be colocated with ACL 2022 in Dublin , Ireland, as a hybrid event. The workshop dates are not yet fixed but will be on May 26-28, or possibly both dates. This year, LChange will feature a shared task on semantic change detection for Spanish as one track of the workshop. We hope to make this third edition another resounding success!

The call for papers will be similar to last time: all aspects around computational approaches to historical language change with the focus on digital text corpora. If you have published in the field previously, and are inrerested in helping out in the PC to review papers, send us an email. LChange'19 resulted in a book on Computational approaches to semantic change, and this year, we are considering a special issue journal for invited workshop papers.

Important Dates

• Feb. 28, 2022: Paper submission
• March 26, 2022: Notification of acceptance
• April 10, 2022: Camera-ready papers due
• May 26-28, 2022: Workshop date (days will be decided upon later)

Workshop Topics

This workshop explores state-of-the-art computational methodologies, theories and digital text resources on exploring the time-varying nature of human language.

The aim of this workshop is three-fold. First, we want to provide pioneering researchers who work on computational methods, evaluation, and large-scale modelling of language change an outlet for disseminating cutting-edge research on topics concerning language change. We want to utilize this proposed workshop as a platform for sharing state-of-the-art research progress in this fundamental domain of natural language research.

Second, in doing so we want to bring together domain experts across disciplines. by connecting researchers in historical linguistics with those that develop and test computational methods for detecting semantic change and laws of semantic change; and those that need knowledge (of the occurrence and shape) of language change, for example, in digital humanities and computational social sciences where text mining is applied to diachronic corpora subject to e.g., lexical semantic change.

Third, the detection and modelling of language change using diachronic text and text mining raise undamental theoretical and methodological challenges for future research.

Besides these goals, this workshop will also support discussion on the evaluation of computational methodologies for uncovering language change. SemEval2020 Task1 on unsupervised detection of lexical semantic change attracted three figure submission numbers and a total of 21 submitted system papers. Since then, two more tasks have been completed, and we will organize the shared task on Spanish as a part of this workshop.

We invite original research papers from a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

• Novel methods for detecting diachronic semantic change and lexical replacement
• Automatic discovery and quantitative evaluation of laws of language change
• Computational theories and generative models of language change
• Sense-aware (semantic) change analysis
• Diachronic word sense disambiguation
• Novel methods for diachronic analysis of low-resource languages
• Novel methods for diachronic linguistic data visualization
• Novel applications and implications of language change detection
• Quantification of sociocultural influences on language change
• Cross-linguistic, phylogenetic, and developmental approaches to language change
• Novel datasets for cross-linguistic and diachronic analyses of language

Shared Task

The task will have two subtasks organized in two phases respectively:

• discovery, and
• binary change detection (detection of sense gain or loss vs. neither).

Note that discovery introduces additional difficulties for models as compared to the more simple semantic change detection, e.g. because a large number of predictions is required and the target words are not preselected, balanced or cleaned. Yet, discovery is an important task, with applications such as lexicography where dictionary makers aim to cover the full vocabulary of a language.

The full task description will be published on CodaLab with a short description on the workshop web page.

Task organizers: Frank D. Zamora-Reina, Felipe Bravo-Marquez, Dominik Schlechtweg.

Keynote Talks

To be announced

Submissions

We accept three types of submissions, long and short papers, following the ACL2022 style, and the ACL submission policy, and shared task papers.

Details on paper length and submission proceedure will be posted once released by ACL2022.

The workshop is planned to last two full days. Submissions are open to all, and are to be submitted anonymously. Workshop papers will be refereed through a double-blind peer review process by at least three reviewers with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organizers. Shared task participants can choose to submit their papers to the shared task where papers will be reviewed by other task participants, or to the main workshop where they will be reviewed according to the normal workshop proceedure.

Contact

Contact us if you have any questions.

Organisers: Nina Tahmasebi, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen, Syrielle Montariol, and Haim Dubossarsky.

Anti-Harassment Policy

Our workshop highly values the open exchange of ideas, the freedom of thought and expression, and respectful scientific debate. We support and uphold the ACL Anti-Harassment policy, and any workshop participant should feel free to contact any of the workshop organisers or Priscilla Rasmussen, in case of any issues.

References:

• Simon Hengchen, Nina Tahmasebi, Dominik Schlechtweg, Haim Dubossarsky. Challenges for Computational Lexical Semantic Change. Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen (eds). Computational Approaches to Semantic Change. Berlin: Language Science Press.
• Nina Tahmasebi, Adam Jatowt, Lars Borin. Survey of Computational Approaches to Lexical Semantic Change Detection. Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen (eds). Computational Approaches to Semantic Change. Berlin: Language Science Press.
• Baayen, R. Harald. 2001. Word Frequency Distributions. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Koplenig, Alexander. 2015. The Impact of Lacking Metadata for the Measurement of Cultural and Linguistic Change Using the Google Ngram Data Sets—Reconstructing the Composition of the German Corpus in Times of WWII. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities fqv037. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv037.
• Koplenig, Alexander, Sascha Wolfer & Carolin Müller-Spitzer. 2019. Studying Lexical Dynamics and Language Change via Generalized Entropies: The Problem of Sample Size. Entropy 21(5). https://doi.org/10.3390/e21050464. http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/5/464.
• Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change (Language in Society 20). Oxford, UK ; Cambridge [Mass.]: Blackwell.
• Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Verses, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, et al. 2010. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books (Supporting Online Material II). Science 331(14). http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176/suppl/DC1 (5 March, 2014).
• Pechenick, Eitan Adam, Christopher M. Danforth & Peter Sheridan Dodds. 2015. Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution. (Ed.) Alain Barrat. PLOS ONE 10(10). e0137041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137041.
• Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2016. About text frequencies in historical linguistics: Disentangling environmental and grammatical change. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12(1). 153–171. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2015-0068.