Sabbatical Dirk Speelman: Distributional semantics meets Digital Humanities

Recent methodological advances in corpus-based distributional semantics have made it possible to study semantics in new ways and, above all, on a scale that was previously unimaginable, both within earlier theoretical/descriptive and more applied research. Whereas extensive empirical linguistic research previously had to make do with the study of semantics with a rather limited set of instruments, certainly compared to what was available to study the formal side of language, and the study of semantics was forced to remain manual and small-scale, now a long-awaited catch-up has finally been made and semantics could finally gain a full place in large-scale empirical linguistic research. Having devoted myself in the last decade to deepening, refining and applying this new approach to primarily lexicological research — a logical starting point — the time has come to broaden and explore its potential in other domains. In this sabbatical period focused on resourcing, study and exploration, I want to thoroughly explore and prepare broadening in three possible directions. In all three cases, these are domains in which advanced corpus-based methods are already used intensively, but for the time being mainly for the study of more formal aspects of language, without (or only rarely with) incorporation of scalable operationalizations of semantics, an addition that can nevertheless represent an important enrichment. The first domain is the corpus-based study of the use of constructions (in a language-based theoretical framework). The second domain is that of applied textual analysis in a Digital Humanities context (with a view to the study of concepts in literary and historical texts). The third domain is that of the analysis of communication and language use in social media (with a view to opinion mining and the study of the dissemination of information, disinformation and misinformation).