Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 144.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
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        Date: 2023-07-13 19:39:55+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: Digiclass London seminar: Lexical semantic change detection in medical Latin

"Lexical semantic change detection in Latin: a use-case on medical Latin"
Paola Marongiu (University of Neuchâtel) & Barbara McGillivray (KCL)

Friday 14 July 2023, 5:00PM - 6:00PM
Institute of Classical Studies, Senate House London

This seminar will be held in the MakerSpace, Room 265, 2nd floor, Senate
House.

It will also be livestreamed at: https://youtu.be/wDAMEVHKBmA

Lexical semantic change (LSC) is the linguistic phenomenon by which
words change their meaning over time. Recently, there has been a growing
interest in applying computational resources to investigate LSC. Among
these resources, diachronic word embeddings have been applied with
success to LSC research in various languages, among which Latin
(Sprugnoli et al. 2020). In this seminar, I will report on the results
of the evaluation of diachronic word embeddings to trace LSC in Latin,
with a case-study on medical Latin.

The lexicon of technical or specialised languages generally shows
examples of LSC (Roelli 2021). The lexicon of medical Latin in
particular is rich in polysemous words that have acquired more
specialised meanings, developed from more basic or common ones through
various types of semantic change (Langslow 2000; Roelli 2021). Examples
are forceps (or forfex) from ‘tongs’ to ‘surgical pincers’, mola from
‘mill-stone’ to ‘molar tooth’, causa from ‘cause (of a disease)’ to
‘disease’ (Langslow, 2000: 155;165;182). Moreover, Latin medical texts
cover a diachronic span going from the 1st century BCE (Celsus’ /De
medicina/) to the 19th century CE (von Bene’s /Elementa medicinae
practicae/), which allows for a diachronic study of semantic changes on
technical terms.

After a short introduction on the application of diachronic word
embeddings to LSC detection, I will present the results of this
case-study on medical Latin. In particular, I will elaborate on the
strategies implemented for the evaluation of the word embeddings, based
on previous work on Latin (Sprugnoli et al. 2020). This will comprise i)
the presentation of the gold standard dataset built for the evaluation
by combining lexical and lexicographic resources for Latin; ii) a
discussion on the issues of applying diachronic word embeddings to LSC
detection in Latin, specifically on medical Latin lexicon, and possible
ways for improvement.

ALL WELCOME





==
Dr Gabriel BODARD (he/him)
Reader in Digital Classics

Institute of Classical Studies / Digital Humanities Research Hub
University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU



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