May 23, 2025, 13:30-15:00
Location: Old observatory, Uppsala University
Registration: a link will be posted here two weeks before the seminar
Speaker: Nina N. Tahmasebi, University of Gothenburg
Title: Change is Key! And the study of cultural and societal change
Abstract: Language is the primary medium through which humans communicate, conveying not only individual needs but also shared cultural values and social constructs. These needs and values evolve over time, vary across geographical and cultural boundaries, and change within different communities. This evolution is reflected in language and can be studied through textual analysis, which provides a lens through which to examine how societies and cultures change over time.
In this talk, I will present the Change is Key! research programme and describe our ongoing work with developing advanced methods for large-scale text analysis, with a particular focus on Large Language Models (LLMs). I will describe our work with lexicography, conceptual history and gender studies, and look ahead to our future work in literary studies and the social sciences.
Bio: Nina Tahmasebi is an Associate professor in computational linguistics at the University of Gothenburg with expertise in large-scale natural language processing. She has studied lexical semantic change from a computational perspective, developing theory, methods, evaluation techniques, and resources for the past two decades.
She also works with text mining and artificial intelligence for the digital humanities, both practically and regarding epistemological questions relating to data-intensive research methodology. Importantly, her research addresses the question of how text mining can be used to generate stable knowledge in text-based humanities and social sciences.