Caroline SPORLEDER

Durant le mois de mars 2018, le labex TransferS et Thierry Poibeau (Lattice) accueillent Caroline SPORLEDER, directrice du Centre for Digital Humanities de l’Université de Göttingen (Allemagne).

Natural language processing for Digital Humanities

• Mardi 6 mars, 10h-12h, ENS salle Cavaillès
• Network Analysis for Literature
• The automatic analysis of works of literature such as novels or poems is an interesting and intricate application for natural language processing. Literature not only poses a challenge by being a text type considerably different from the newspaper texts that most NLP tools are trained on, it also opens up intriguing new research questions, including how to detect regions of high suspense and how to model the particular footprint of an author or literary genre. A research topic that has sparked the interest of literary scholars and computational linguists alike is the analysis of character interactions, which are usually modelled as social networks. I will describe analogue and digital approaches to the creation and analysis of character network, focusing on whether such networks can be exploited to detect the author or genre of works of literature.

• Mardi 13 mars, 10h-12h, ENS salle Cavaillès
• Figurative Language in Discourse
• Figurative language poses a serious challenge to NLP systems. The use of idiomatic and metaphoric expressions is not only extremely widespread in natural language ; many figurative expressions, in particular idioms, also behave idiosyncratically. These idiosyncrasies are not restricted to a non-compositional meaning but often also extend to syntactic properties, selectional preferences etc. To deal appropriately with such expressions, NLP tools need to detect figurative language and assign the correct analyses to non-literal expressions. I this talk, I will look at how figurative expressions behave in discourse and how they are chosen for a deliberate effect in a genre, in particular political discourse. I will also report on research dedicated to detecting and analysing figurative expressions automatically.

• Mardi 20 mars, 10h-12h, ENS salle Cavaillès
• Recognising and Disambiguating Named Entities in Historical Texts
• When Humanists explore a text collection they are often particularly interested in named entities, in particular locations and people. Named entity recognition tools are consequently in high demand in the Digital Humanities. Off-the-shelf tools however often provide sub-optimal results. This is partly due to problems relating to a change in domain, which not only tends to decrease recognition performance but also often means that the named entity inventories themselves are inadequate for the target domain. On top of this, named entity recognition typically isn’t sufficient but needs to be complemented with named entity disambiguation, which links entity expressions to their real world referents. Finally, historical texts offer particular challenges, especially for place names. In this talk, I will summarise the challenges and potential solutions for recognising and disambiguation named entities in texts from the Humanities.

• Mardi 27 mars, 10h-12h, ENS salle Cavaillès
• Analysing Social Media Data for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences
• Microblogging platforms (Twitter) and other social media formats (Facebook, discussion forums) provide data that can be of interest to the Humanities and especially the Social Sciences. In this talk, I will discuss different approaches of analysing social media content in order to detect echo chambers, perform opinion and topic mining or detect fake accounts. The focus will be on the political domain, i.e. looking at how political affairs are discussed by social media users.

Caroline Sporleder is a full professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Göttingen, where she also heads the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH). Having had an interest in both the Humanities and Computing, she originally studied Linguistics, English, History and Computer Science and obtained her PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh before moving to the Netherlands to work on her first Digital Humanities research project at Tilburg University and the Dutch National Natural History Museum Naturalis in Leiden. This was followed by longer stay at Saarland University, where she headed a junior research group in Computational Linguistics, and, subsequently, a professorial position at Trier University. Her current research interests lie both in the area of computational semantics and discourse processing, in particular computational approaches to figurative language and the semantics-discourse interface, and in applied research in the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, such as analysing literary works and microblogging content as well as developing text mining methods for historical text collections.

• Entrée libre dans la limite des places disponibles

  Mardis 6, 13, 20 et 27 mars 2018 10h00-12h00 ENS, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 salle Cavaillès (1er étage, escalier A)