Submitted by tomski on 13 January, 2020 - 16:36.
WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with the faculty and students. This time we have the honour to host a world renown linguist, Professor William Kretzschmar (University of Georgia, Athens) who is staying with us as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences. He will deliver a lecture on Language and Complex Systems in Text Analysis that will take place on January 17 (Friday), 2019, at 11:45 a.m. in Sala Górna, Collegium Heliodori.
Language and Complex Systems in Text Analysis
by
Professor William Kretzschmar
Friday, January 17, 11:45 a.m.
Sala Górna, Collegium Heliodori
The basic elements of speech (i.e., language in use, what people actually say and write to and for each other) correspond to what has been called a “complex system” in sciences ranging from physics to ecology to economics (Kretzschmar, Language and Complex Systems, Cambridge UP, 2015). I will introduce the principles of complexity science in a non-technical way, and then apply properties of complexity to text analysis. Complex systems shows us, through its property of scale-free nonlinear distributions, the special features of language in any author's work or any group of texts. Common statistical techniques from Natural Language Processing, as in Sentiment Analysis, do not address nonlinear distributions and so they often fail to provide convincing results. The key is to use comparisons effectively, between one author and a group of authors, or between a group of texts and a representation of common language. The everpresent nonlinear curve gives us a good visual means to identify important results. Thus, we can apply the significance of frequency distributions and scaling to problems we need to address with corpora, and do so without having to use highly technical math or statistics.
