Historical Language Processing

Historical Language Processing

When: Wednesday January 24th, 12pm
WhereDH Active Learning Space, Food Science Building 4.58
Presentations last ~45mins, followed by short discussion
Historical Language Processing
Dr. Thomas Koentges
Abstract
The last decades of Natural Language Processing research have developed promising automated analytical methods to process and classify huge amounts of texts. While there are now already mature software tools and methods for processing works in English, they do not work out-of-the-box for historical languages, which often have a richer and more complex morphology. In this talk, I will present some natural language processing methods and which strategies researchers can employ to make them work for historical languages or other morphologically-complex languages.
About the Speaker
Dr. Thomas Koentges is an Akademischer Assistent (Assistant Professor) at the Alexander-von-Humboldt Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and currently holds a Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University, where his research is focused on Historical Language Processing and Data Analysis. After completing a traditional PhD summa cum laude in Classics (University of Otago, New Zealand), his research broadened and is now located in digital humanities: in particular, the effects of the organization and delivery of cultural heritage metadata on the work of humanities researchers, the computational research of historical languages, topic modelling, digital stemmatology, and citizen science, as well as the research and production of digital editions and the curation of digital images of manuscripts. His topic-modelling methods have been used when researching Latin literature at the University of Leipzig and have since been applied to other morphologically complex languages, including Ancient Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian. Several higher education institutions are using the alpha version of his Latent-Dirichlet-Allocation topic modelling app, (Meletē)ToPān v.0.4.
For more on Dr. Koentges, see:

About the Colloquium
UCC’s Digital Arts & Humanities Research Colloquium draws speakers from across Cork’s research community (and sometimes beyond). Comprised of subject experts and postgraduate students, the event fosters multidisciplinary exchange while exposing students and faculty to new concepts, methods, and projects.