Nina Tahmasebi

Associate Professor in NLP
Ph.D. computer science
Master of Science in Engineering Mathematics
Bachelor of Science in Mathematics

Our project Towards Automatic Detection of Language Change (2019 - 2022) with Simon Hengchen, Richard Johansson, and Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm has been running for a year and a half. So far, we have published an ACL paper, organized the first ever international workshop on computational methods for historical language change (LChange'19), given several talks, and given a few local workshops, the latest at the Alan Turing Institute. Our survey paper on Computational Approaches to Lexical Semantic Change can be found on ArXiV. We have also run the SemEval-2020: Task 1 on Unsupservised Lexical Semantic Change Detection. Keep updated with our latest activities and plans via our news-list.

Research interests

lexical semantic change
data science for the humanities
algorithms and methods for temporal evolution
knowledge discovery

With advances in technology and culture and through high impact events, our language changes. We invent new words, add or change meanings of existing words and rename existing things. This results in a dynamic language that progresses with our needs and provides us with the possibilities to express ourselves and describe the world around us. The phenomenon is called language change.

I work on automatic detection of language changes with two main objectives in mind; to help users find and interpret content in long-term archives. When things, locations and people have different names in the archives from those we are familiar with, we cannot find relevant documents by means of simple string matching techniques. The strings matching the modern names will not correspond to the strings matching the names stored in the archive. And, even if we are able to find relevant documents, there is no guarantee that we can interpret the content. Words and expressions reflect our culture and evolve over time. Without explicit knowledge about these changes, we risk placing modern meanings on these expressions which leads to wrong interpretations.

My focus is primarily on word sense changes and general word-to-word changes. Word sense change relates to words that stay the same over time but change their meaning, either by adding one or several new senses, changing an existing sense or removing a sense. Also new words with their new senses fall into this category.

“ Sebastini's benenefit last night at the Opera-House was overflowing with the fashionable and gay. ”

The above quote was published on April 27, 1787 in The Times and carries a reference to a word that has since changed its primary meaning. When read today, the word gay will most likely be interpreted as homosexual because of the popularity of the sense today. However, this particular sense of the word was not introduced until the early 20th century and instead, in this context the word should be interpreted with the sense of happy.

Word-to-word changes relate to concepts that stay the same with different words to represent them. The general problem is difficult to solve but has an easier subproblem, namely term-to-term changes which relate to named entity changes.

“ The Germans are brought nearer to Stalingrad and the command of the lower Volga. ”

The above quote was published on July 18, 1942 in The Times and refers to the Russian city that figures often in the context of World War II. In reference to World War II people speak of the city of Stalingrad or the Battle of Stalingrad, however, the city cannot be found on a modern map. In 1961, Stalingrad was renamed to Volgograd and has since been replaced on maps and in modern resources. Not knowing of this change leads to several problems. Knowing only about Volgograd means that the history of the city becomes inaccessible as documents that describe its history only contain the name Stalingrad (or Tsaritsyn as the city was named before 1925). Reversely, knowing only about Stalingrad makes is difficult to find information about the current state and location of the city.

Broadly, I am interested in temporal evolution of all sorts of information, including opinions, topics and graphs and in textual information extraction. Lately, I have been involved in creating a Billion word corpus for modern Swedish, a representation of written, modern Swedish as well as creating a Swedish sentiment lexicon.

Professional Duties

Keynote

Synergies conference, 2020 (May 2020, Odense)
Literary studies and DH

Synergies conference talk on YouTube

Workshop on Digital Literacy, 2020

Keynote
6th Estonian Digital Humanities Conference dhe2018

Detecting language change for the digital humanities

Chair local organizing committee
21st Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa 2017)
http://nodalida2017.se/

Programme committee
Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 2nd Conference (DHN2017)
http://dhn2017.eu/

Local organizing committee
14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL2014)
http://eacl2014.org/

Workshop co-chair
International Workshop on Social Media Semantics (SMS 2013)
http://www.onthemove-conferences.org/index.php/sms2013

Workshop organizer

1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
https://languagechange.org/events/2019-acl-lcworkshop/
Workshop on Automatic Detection of Language Change
workshop-automatic-detection-language-change
The first Swedish national SWE-CLARIN workshop
https://sweclarin.se/swe/lt-based-e-hss-sweden--taking-stock-and-looking-ahead
Semantic technologies for research in the humanities and social sciences (STRiX)
http://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/strix2014

Test set

SemEval-2020 Task 1: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection
Schlechtweg, Dominik; McGillivray, Barbara; Hengchen, Simon; Dubossarsky, Haim; Tahmasebi, Nina
SemEval-2020 Task description paper

Swedish Test Data for SemEval 2020 Task 1:Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection
Tahmasebi, Nina; Hengchen, Simon; Schlechtweg, Dominik; McGillivray, Barbara; Dubossarsky, Haim

Word Sense Change Test Set
Tahmasebi and Risse: Finding Individual Word Sense Changes and their Delay in Appearance. RANLP 2017

Named Entity Evolution Dataset
Tahmasebi, Gossen, Kanhabua, Holzmann and Risse: NEER: An Unsupervised Method for Named Entity Evolution Recognition Coling 2012

2021

Simon Hengchen, Nina Tahmasebi (2021): A Collection of Swedish Diachronic Word Embedding Models Trained on Historical Newspaper Data, in Journal of Open Humanities Data, volume 7, issue 2, pages 1-7.

2020

Jacobo Rouces, Lars Borin, Nina Tahmasebi (2020): Creating an Annotated Corpus for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis in Swedish, in Proceedings of the 5th conference in Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries, Riga, Latvia, October 21-23, 2020.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Barbara McGillivray, Simon Hengchen, Haim Dubossarsky, Nina Tahmasebi (2020): SemEval-2020 Task 1: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection, in Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval2020), Barcelona, Spain (Online), December 12, 2020.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Barbara McGillivray, Simon Hengchen, Haim Dubossarsky, Nina Tahmasebi (2020): Post-Evaluation Data for SemEval-2020 Task 1: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection, in Zenodo.
Nina Tahmasebi, Simon Hengchen, Dominik Schlechtweg, Barbara McGillivray, Haim Dubossarsky (2020): Swedish Test Data for SemEval 2020 Task 1: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection, in Zenodo.

2019

Haim Dubossarsky, Simon Hengchen, Nina Tahmasebi, Dominik Schlechtweg (2019): Time-Out: Temporal Referencing for Robust Modeling of Lexical Semantic Change, in Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 28 - August 2, 2019 / Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez (Editors).
Yvonne Adesam, Dana Dannélls, Nina Tahmasebi (2019): Exploring the Quality of the Digital Historical Newspaper Archive KubHist, in Proceedings of the 4th Conference of The Association Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN), Copenhagen, Denmark, March 5-8, 2019 / edited by Costanza Navarretta, Manex Agirrezabal, Bente Maegaard.
Haim Dubossarsky, Simon Hengchen, Nina Tahmasebi, Dominik Schlechtweg (2019): Time for change: Evaluating models of semantic change without evaluation tasks, in Cambridge Language Sciences Annual Symposium 2019 : Perspectives on Language Change.
Jacobo Rouces, Lars Borin, Nina Tahmasebi (2019): Tracking Attitudes Towards Immigration in Swedish Media, in CEUR Workshop Proceedings (Vol. 2364). Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 4th Conference.
Jacobo Rouces, Lars Borin, Nina Tahmasebi (2019): Political Stance Analysis Using Swedish Parliamentary Data, in CEUR Workshop Proceedings (Vol. 2364). Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 4th Conference.
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu (2019): Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, August 2, 2019, Florence, Italy.
Nina Tahmasebi, Niclas Hagen, Daniel Brodén, Mats Malm (2019): A Convergence of Methodologies: Notes on Data-Intensive Humanities Research, in CEUR workshop proceedings ; 2364. Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries.
Nina Tahmasebi, Simon Hengchen (2019): The Strengths and Pitfalls of Large-Scale Text Mining for Literary Studies, in Samlaren : tidskrift för svensk litteraturvetenskaplig forskning, volume 140, pages 198–227.

2018

Yvonne Adesam, Dana Dannélls, Nina Tahmasebi (2018): Exploring the Quality of the Digital Historical Newspaper Archive KubHist, in Seventh Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC), Stockholm, 7-9 November 2018.
Adam Jatowt, Ricardo Campos, Sourav S. Bhowmick , Nina Tahmasebi, Antoine Doucet (2018): Every Word Has Its History: Interactive Exploration and Visualization of Word Sense Evolution, in CIKM '18 Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, October 22 - 26, 2018, Torino, Italy.
Jacobo Rouces, Lars Borin, Nina Tahmasebi, Stian Rødven Eide (2018): Defining a gold standard for a Swedish sentiment lexicon: Towards higher-yield text mining in the digital humanities, in CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 2084. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference Helsinki, Finland, March 7-9, 2018. Edited by Eetu Mäkelä Mikko Tolonen Jouni Tuominen.
Jacobo Rouces, Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Stian Rødven Eide (2018): Generating a Gold Standard for a Swedish Sentiment Lexicon, in LREC 2018, Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, May 7-12, 2018, Miyazaki (Japan).
Jacobo Rouces, Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Stian Rødven Eide (2018): SenSALDO: Creating a Sentiment Lexicon for Swedish, in LREC 2018, Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 7-12 May 2018, Miyazaki (Japan).
Nina Tahmasebi (2018): A Study on Word2Vec on a Historical Swedish Newspaper Corpus, in CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Vol. 2084. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference, Helsinki Finland, March 7-9, 2018. Edited by Eetu Mäkelä, Mikko Tolonen, Jouni Tuominen.

2017

Sallam Abualhajia, Nina Tahmasebi, Diane Forin, Karl-Heinz Zimmermann (2017): Parameter Transfer across Domains for Word Sense Disambiguation, in Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing Meet Deep Learning, Varna, Bulgaria 2–8 September 2017 / Edited by Galia Angelova, Kalina Bontcheva, Ruslan Mitkov, Ivelina Nikolova, Irina Temnikova.
Lars Borin, Nina Tahmasebi, Elena Volodina, Stefan Ekman, Caspar Jordan, Jon Viklund, Beáta Megyesi, Jesper Näsman, Anne Palmér, Mats Wirén, Kristina Björkenstam, Gintare Grigonyte, Sofia Gustafson Capková, Tomasz Kosiński (2017): Swe-Clarin: Language resources and technology for Digital Humanities, in Digital Humanities 2016. Extended Papers of the International Symposium on Digital Humanities (DH 2016) Växjö, Sweden, November, 7-8, 2016. Edited by Koraljka Golub, Marcelo Milra. Vol-2021.
Nina Tahmasebi, Thomas Risse (2017): On the Uses of Word Sense Change for Research in the Digital Humanities, in Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries - 21st International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2017, Thessaloniki, Greece, September 18-21, 2017. Proceedings / edited by Jaap Kamps, Giannis Tsakonas, Yannis Manolopoulos, Lazaros Iliadis, Ioannis Karydis.
Nina Tahmasebi, Thomas Risse (2017): Finding Individual Word Sense Changes and their Delay in Appearance, in Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing 2017. Varna, Bulgaria 2–8 September, 2017 / edited by Galia Angelova, Kalina Bontcheva, Ruslan Mitkov, Ivelina Nikolova, Irina Temnikova.
Jörg Tidemann, Nina Tahmasebi (2017): Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, NODALIDA 2017, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 22-24, 2017.

2016

Stian Rødven Eide, Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin (2016): The Swedish Culturomics Gigaword Corpus: A One Billion Word Swedish Reference Dataset for NLP, in Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings. Digital Humanities 2016. From Digitization to Knowledge 2016: Resources and Methods for Semantic Processing of Digital Works/Texts, July 11, 2016, Krakow, Poland.
Bianka Nusko, Nina Tahmasebi, Olof Mogren (2016): Building a Sentiment Lexicon for Swedish, in Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings, volume 126, issue 006, pages 32--37.
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Caspar Jordan, Stefan Ekman (2016): SWE-CLARIN – the Swedish CLARIN project – aims and activities, in Digital Humanities in the Nordic countries, Oslo, March 15-17 2016, pages 122-123.

2015

Malin Ahlberg, Peter Andersson, Markus Forsberg, Nina Tahmasebi (2015): A case study on supervised classification of Swedish pseudo-coordination, in Proceedings of the 20th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics, NODALIDA 2015, May 11-13, 2015, Vilnius, Lithuania.
Helge Holzmann, Nina Tahmasebi, Thomas Risse (2015): Named entity evolution recognition on the Blogosphere, in International Journal on Digital Libraries, volume 15, issue 2-4, pages 209-235.
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Gabriele Capannini, Devdatt Dubhashi, Peter Exner, Markus Forsberg, Gerhard Gossen, Fredrik Johansson, Richard Johansson, Mikael Kågebäck, Olof Mogren, Pierre Nugues, Thomas Risse (2015): Visions and open challenges for a knowledge-based culturomics, in International Journal on Digital Libraries, volume 15, issue 2-4, pages 169-187.

2014

Mikael Kågebäck, Olof Mogren, Nina Tahmasebi, Devdatt Dubhashi (2014): Extractive Summarization using Continuous Vector Space Models, in Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Continuous Vector Space Models and their Compositionality (CVSC) EACL, April 26-30, 2014 Gothenburg, Sweden, pages 31-39.

2013

Elena Demidova, N. Barbieri, Stefan Dietze, Adam Funk, Gerhard Gossen, Diana Maynard, N. Papailiou, V. Plachouras, W. Peters, Y. Stavrakas, Thomas Risse, Nina Tahmasebi (2013): Analysing Entities, Topics and Events in Community Memories, in Proc. of the first International Workshop on Archiving Community Memories.
Helge Holzmann, Nina Tahmasebi, Thomas Risse (2013): BlogNEER: Applying Named Entity Evolution Recognition on the Blogosphere, in 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives, SDA 2013 - Co-located with 17th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2013; Valetta; Malta; 26 September 2013, volume 1091, pages 28-39.
D. Spiliotopoulos, T. Risse, Nina Tahmasebi (2013): SMS 2013 PC co-chairs message, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Nina Tahmasebi (2013): Models and Algorithms for Automatic Detection of Language Evolution.
Nina Tahmasebi, Thomas Risse (2013): The Role of Language Evolution in Digital Archives, in 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives, SDA 2013 - Co-located with 17th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2013; Valetta; Malta; 26 September 2013, pages 16-27.

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Associate Professor

Researcher

Email

nina.tahmasebi@gu.se

Telephone

+46-31786 6953