Schedule and speakers 2023

Abstracts

Keynote: Mark Liberman (U. Pennsylvania)

This talk will survey Corpus Linguistics from four perspectives: What, Why, How, and Who?

After a sketch of the past, I will focus on the rapidly changing present, and the promising but uncertain future. Adjacent areas under different names -- Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Human Language Technology -- have experienced decades of exponential growth in computation, networking, and algorithmic power, which allow us to do old things in new ways, and also to explore a wide range of entirely new things.

Across the board, corpus-based research provides large-scale real-world empirical tests for ideas about speech, language, and communication. And these tests are getting easier and faster due to growth in computer performance and the development of new algorithms.

Among the new algorithmic opportunities are the varied and evolving roles of Deep Learning and Large Language Models, often integrated with other models and methods. These techniques are transforming the corpus-based research approaches that we have been using more painfully for half a century, as well as creating new applications in fields as diverse as medicine, education, law, sociology, history, literary studies, and project management.

Andreas van Cranenburgh (RUG)

Why is one novel still read, while another is forgotten? Literary scholars answer that the first is part of the canon, while the other is not. But what determines “canonicity”? Is this purely subjective, or can we partly attribute it to textual features? In this talk I will address these questions with classification experiments based on textual features of novels in a representative corpus.