Barbara Mcgillivray
Biographic Data
| ID | 1468167 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barbara Mcgillivray |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barbara |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgillivray |
| SIGNATURE | MCGILLIVRAY B |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3426-8200 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Semantic change and socio-semantic variation: The case of Covid-related neologisms on Reddit
COVID-19 has triggered innovations in science and society globally, leading to the emergence or establishment of formal neologisms such as infodemic and working from home ( WFH ). While previous work on COVID-related lexical innovation has focused on such formal neologisms, this paper uses data from Reddit to study semantic neologisms like lockdown and mask , which have changed in meaning due to the pandemic. First, we identify words that have un…
Natural Language Processing for Ancient Greek: Design, advantages and challenges of language models
Computational methods have produced meaningful and usable results to study word semantics, including semantic change. These methods, belonging to the field of Natural Language Processing, have recently been applied to ancient languages; in particular, language modelling has been applied to Ancient Greek, the language on which we focus. In this contribution we explain how vector representations can be computed from word co-occurrences in a corpus …
Computational valency lexica and Homeric formularity
The wider availability of large-scale datasets and reproducible algorithms has boosted the application of NLP to living languages. On the other hand, dead languages benefit from the availability of curated resources both to offset the sparseness of available data and to make data accessible to researchers. We present here AGVaLex, a computational valency lexicon automatically extracted from the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank. It contains quant…
Quantifying the quantitative (re-)turn in historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change and stability, of the history of individual languages, and of the relatedness between languages. This comment considers the adoption of quantitative methods in recent historical linguistics research, and compares a study on 2012 publications with a similar study conducted seven years later. This comment argues for the advantages of a wider adoption of quantitative methods among historical lin…
The Living Machine: A Computational Approach to the Nineteenth-Century Language of Technology
This article examines a long-standing question in the history of technology concerning the trope of the living machine. The authors do this by using a cutting-edge computational method, which they apply to large collections of digitized texts. In particular, they demonstrate the affordances of a neural language model for historical research. In a deliberate maneuver, the authors use a type of model, often portrayed as sentient today, to detect fi…
Investigating patterns of change, stability, and interaction among scientific disciplines using embeddings
Multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary collaboration can be an appropriate response to tackling the increasingly complex problems faced by today’s society. Scientific disciplines are not rigidly defined entities and their profiles change over time. No previous study has investigated multiple disciplinarity (i.e. the complex interaction between disciplines, whether of a multidisciplinary or an interdisciplinary nature) at scale with quantitativ…
A new corpus annotation framework for Latin diachronic lexical semantics
We present a new corpus-based resource and methodology for the annotation of Latin lexical semantics, consisting of 2,399 annotated passages of 40 lemmas from the Latin diachronic corpus LatinISE. We also describe how the annotation was designed, analyse annotators’ styles, and present the preliminary results of a study on the lexical semantics and diachronic change of the 40 lemmas. We complement this analysis with a case study on semantic vague…
Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing: Je t’aime… Moi non plus
In spite of the increasingly large textual datasets humanities researchers are confronted with, and the need for automatic tools to extract information from them, we observe a lack of communication and diverging goals between the communities of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Digital Humanities (DH). This contrasts with the wealth of potential opportunities that could arise from closer collaborations. We argue that more efforts are needed t…
Lemmatization for Ancient Greek: An experimental assessment of the state of the art
This article presents the result of accuracy tests for currently available Ancient Greek lemmatizers and recently published lemmatized corpora. We ran a blinded experiment in which three highly proficient readers of Ancient Greek evaluated the output of the CLTK lemmatizer, of the CLTK backoff lemmatizer, and of GLEM , together with the lemmatizations offered by the Diorisis corpus and the Lemmatized Ancient Greek Texts repository. The texts chos…
Reconstructing constructional semantics: The dative subject construction in Old Norse-Icelandic, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Russian and Old Lithuanian
As the historical linguistic community is well aware, reconstructing semantics is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Such reconstruction has so far mostly been carried out on lexical items, like words and morphemes, and has not been conducted for larger and more complex linguistic units, which intuitively seems to be a more intricate task, especially given the lack of methodological criteria and guidelines within the field. This follows directl…
No prominent works on this page.
Reconstructing constructional semantics: The dative subject construction in Old Norse-Icelandic, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Russian and Old Lithuanian
As the historical linguistic community is well aware, reconstructing semantics is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Such reconstruction has so far mostly been carried out on lexical items, like words and morphemes, and has not been conducted for larger and more complex linguistic units, which intuitively seems to be a more intricate task, especially given the lack of methodological criteria and guidelines within the field. This follows directl…
Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing: Je t’aime… Moi non plus
In spite of the increasingly large textual datasets humanities researchers are confronted with, and the need for automatic tools to extract information from them, we observe a lack of communication and diverging goals between the communities of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Digital Humanities (DH). This contrasts with the wealth of potential opportunities that could arise from closer collaborations. We argue that more efforts are needed t…
Lemmatization for Ancient Greek: An experimental assessment of the state of the art
This article presents the result of accuracy tests for currently available Ancient Greek lemmatizers and recently published lemmatized corpora. We ran a blinded experiment in which three highly proficient readers of Ancient Greek evaluated the output of the CLTK lemmatizer, of the CLTK backoff lemmatizer, and of GLEM , together with the lemmatizations offered by the Diorisis corpus and the Lemmatized Ancient Greek Texts repository. The texts chos…
Investigating patterns of change, stability, and interaction among scientific disciplines using embeddings
Multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary collaboration can be an appropriate response to tackling the increasingly complex problems faced by today’s society. Scientific disciplines are not rigidly defined entities and their profiles change over time. No previous study has investigated multiple disciplinarity (i.e. the complex interaction between disciplines, whether of a multidisciplinary or an interdisciplinary nature) at scale with quantitativ…
A new corpus annotation framework for Latin diachronic lexical semantics
We present a new corpus-based resource and methodology for the annotation of Latin lexical semantics, consisting of 2,399 annotated passages of 40 lemmas from the Latin diachronic corpus LatinISE. We also describe how the annotation was designed, analyse annotators’ styles, and present the preliminary results of a study on the lexical semantics and diachronic change of the 40 lemmas. We complement this analysis with a case study on semantic vague…
Quantifying the quantitative (re-)turn in historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change and stability, of the history of individual languages, and of the relatedness between languages. This comment considers the adoption of quantitative methods in recent historical linguistics research, and compares a study on 2012 publications with a similar study conducted seven years later. This comment argues for the advantages of a wider adoption of quantitative methods among historical lin…
The Living Machine: A Computational Approach to the Nineteenth-Century Language of Technology
This article examines a long-standing question in the history of technology concerning the trope of the living machine. The authors do this by using a cutting-edge computational method, which they apply to large collections of digitized texts. In particular, they demonstrate the affordances of a neural language model for historical research. In a deliberate maneuver, the authors use a type of model, often portrayed as sentient today, to detect fi…
Natural Language Processing for Ancient Greek: Design, advantages and challenges of language models
Computational methods have produced meaningful and usable results to study word semantics, including semantic change. These methods, belonging to the field of Natural Language Processing, have recently been applied to ancient languages; in particular, language modelling has been applied to Ancient Greek, the language on which we focus. In this contribution we explain how vector representations can be computed from word co-occurrences in a corpus …
Computational valency lexica and Homeric formularity
The wider availability of large-scale datasets and reproducible algorithms has boosted the application of NLP to living languages. On the other hand, dead languages benefit from the availability of curated resources both to offset the sparseness of available data and to make data accessible to researchers. We present here AGVaLex, a computational valency lexicon automatically extracted from the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank. It contains quant…
Semantic change and socio-semantic variation: The case of Covid-related neologisms on Reddit
COVID-19 has triggered innovations in science and society globally, leading to the emergence or establishment of formal neologisms such as infodemic and working from home ( WFH ). While previous work on COVID-related lexical innovation has focused on such formal neologisms, this paper uses data from Reddit to study semantic neologisms like lockdown and mask , which have changed in meaning due to the pandemic. First, we identify words that have un…
Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Natural language processing (8 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (5 works) · Topic Modeling (4 works) · Lexical item (3 works) · Lexical Semantics (3 works) · Mathematics (3 works)