Welcome! I am a Privatdozent/Assistant Professor (Akademische Rätin) at the Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University and a board member of the ACL Special Interest Group on Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities (SIGHUM). My research interests lie in text mining and data analytics for research questions within the Digital Humanities, in particular from sociolinguistics, register/language variation as well as change in language use. My recent focus has been on modeling variation and change in language use considering linguistic as well as other possible variables that might be at play by using probabilistic models.
Come work with me!
Two PhD positions available within the EU Horizon MSCA on Computational Analysis of Semantic Change Across Different Environments (CASCADE)
Official website: https://www.horizoncascade.net/
PhD Topic: Modeling context for the analysis of language variation and change
https://www.uni-saarland.de/fileadmin/upload/verwaltung/stellen/Wissenschaftler/W2439.pdf
PhD Topic: Diachronic development of text types in the English Language
Klicke, um auf W2440.pdf zuzugreifen
In CASCADE I collaborate with James O’Sullivan from University College Cork Ireland, Dirk Spee Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Belgium, Mikko Tolonen from Helsingin Yliopisto Finland and 9 partners throughout Europe. We aim to train early-stage researchers to develop and apply innovative methodologies for Computational Analysis of Semantic Change Across Different Environments (CASCADE), i.e. to identify, analyse and interrogate how meaning is expressed in language in diverse contexts, with a shared focus on the impact of time (diachronic text analytics). CASCADE responds to a skills deficit within the academic, public and commercial sectors: the need for people able to retrieve, critically evaluate and make better use of the large volumes of textual data that characterise our contemporary information society (the ‘data deluge’), thus directly contributing to empowering Digital Humanists.
Other current projects I lead:
Project: Information Density in Englisch Scientific Writing: A Diachronic Perspective (SFB1102, B1)
I’m a Principal Investigator with Elke Teich in the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1102) Information Density and Linguistic Encoding for Project B1, where we investigate register formation and linguistic densification in the evolution of scientific writing in English (17th century to present) (PostDoc Diego Alves and PhD Student Isabell Landwehr)
Project: Overcoming the computational hurdle and exploiting opportunities for humanities students in linguistic research for the Digital Humanities (DH) with Chat-GPT
I’ve received funding (April 2023 – March 2024) from the Data-Pin project „Innovative use of AI in education“ to exploit how AI-Systems such as ChatGPT can be used for programming tasks and beyond by humanities students. With my Research Assistant Sergei Bagdasarov, we design teaching modules for programming tasks and statistical analysis using R and Python.
Previous projects:
I received funding from Saarland University (2021-2022) with my colleague Francesca Delogu to work on Impact of register and sociolinguistic factors on textual coherence. We combine corpus-based and experimental approaches to investigate how social factors (e.g. expert knowledge in a domain) may affect comprehension. We assume that the use of cohesive devices in a text highly depends on (a) a text’s function in a situational context, i.e. the register (e.g. narrative vs expository texts), and (b) social factors, e.g. the comprehender’s age, education or expertise in a particular domain.
Previously, I had received UdS funding to investigate Linguistic Profiles of Social Variables in Diachrony (SLingPro). To observe possible linguistic profiles of social variables in diachrony my team and I have used the Old Bailey Corpus (Huber et al., 2016) — a digital collection of spoken texts based on the proceedings of the London’s central criminal court from the 18th and 19th century, which is annotated for social variables such as age, gender, and social class.
In my PhD I focused on combining macro- and micro-analytical methods for register analysis on evaluative language (PhD Thesis).
Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb 