A Glass Bead Game of *-ology: Contemporary Computational Approaches to Linguistic Morphology, Typology and Social Psychology

In this talk, I will discuss how NLP models can be used to advance other research fields such as linguistic morphology, typology, and social psychology. Contemporary models are especially good at capturing regular patterns in data. To what extent can we use them to study and better understand the dynamics of language?
In the first part, I will focus on models of morphology, the internal structure of words, which is often considered to be highly regular. I will present the UniMorph project, a universal (cross-lingual) annotation schema and a database that currently provides morphological paradigms for over 150 languages. This database not only serves to compare computational models of inflectional morphology in terms of their ability to generalize across many typologically diverse languages but can also be used to estimate morphological complexity of languages.
In the second part of the talk, I will continue with a discussion of computational approaches that are used to explore and predict regular phonetic changes in words that happened over time.
The final part of the talk will be devoted to diachronic changes in language semantics. I will present current approaches to assessing lexical semantic change and illustrate them with examples of changes in the key concepts of social psychology that took place since the 1960s.

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