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Project

Nephological Semantics – Using token clouds for meaning detection in variationist linguistics

The increasing importance of corpus data in linguistics creates a need for appropriate methods for retrieving semantic information from corpora. In the project proposed here, existing computational methods of distributional corpus semantics are further developed in the form of a meaning detection approach based on token clouds, i.e. clusters of distributionally similar attestations of words or expressions in a multidimensional vector space. The first phase of the project has a methodological orientation, focusing on the finetuning of such a 'nephological' method for detecting linguistic meanings in corpus data. In the second phase of the project, the method is put to use in two descriptive research lines: lectometrical research into the relationship between language varieties, and variationist grammar research.
Date:1 Apr 2018 →  26 Feb 2019
Keywords:grammar, vector space modeling, syntax, corpus linguistics
Disciplines:Theory and methodology of literary studies
Project type:PhD project