Språkbanken Text is a department within Språkbanken.

Aleksandrs (Sasha) Berdicevskis

I am a computational linguist interested in language change, language evolution and quantitative typology. For more information about me, see my CV or my personal page.

Projects - finished

Cassandra: Explaining and predicting short-term language change in Contemporary Swedish

Linguists often try to explain language change, but all our explanations are necessarily post hoc and thus difficult to evaluate. What happens if we turn to the future instead of the past and try to predict language change?
Xhosa Corpus

Språkbanken Text collaborates with the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science to create an annotated corpus of Xhosa, an underresourced Bantu language of South Africa (also known as isiXhosa and Xosa).
SuperLim 2.0

The goal of this project is to finalize the evaluation framework SuperLim by contributing training data for the current collection of test sets, a reference implementation (baseline), and a standardized web-based test environment for comparison between models and publication of results (leaderboard).
Svenskt språkdatalabb

Målet med Svenskt Språkdatalabb är att skapa en nationell kunskapsnod inom språkteknologi, och ta fram svenska referensdatamängder för NLP som sedan tillgängliggörs med öppen access i AI Innovation of Swedens datafabrik.
SwedishGlue: a benchmark suite for language models

The purpose of this project is to create high-quality test sets for att enable all actors within Swedish NLP to evaluate and compare language models.

Publications

2024

Yvonne Adesam, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Evie Coussé (2024): Språkförändring på bar gärning. En mikrodiakron korpusstudie av pågående förändringar i stavning, lexikon och grammatik, in Svenskans beskrivning 38: Förhandlingar vid trettioåttonde sammankomsten. Örebro 4–6 maj 2022, Del I, pages 234-251
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Evie Coussé, Alexander Koplenig, Yvonne Adesam (2024): To drop or not to drop? Predicting the omission of the infinitival marker in a Swedish future construction, in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, volume 20, issue 1, pages 219–261

2023

Katharina Ehret, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Christian Bentz, Alice Blumenthal-Dramé (2023): Measuring Language Complexity: challenges and opportunities, in Linguistics Vanguard, volume 9, issue s1, pages 1-8
Evie Coussé, Yvonne Adesam, Faton Rekathati, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2023): Hur används de, dem och dom i nutida skriftspråk? En storskalig korpusundersökning av nyheter och sociala medier, in Språk & Stil, volume NF 33, pages 39-70
Eva-Marie Bloom Ström, Onelisa Slater, Aron Zahran, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Anne Schumacher (2023): Preparing a corpus of spoken Xhosa, in Proceedings of the 2023 CLASP Conference on Learning with Small Data (LSD), Gothenburg and online 11–12 September 2023, pages 62-67
Elena Volodina, Yousuf Ali Mohammed, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Gerlof Bouma, Joey Öhman (2023): DaLAJ-GED – a dataset for Grammatical Error Detection tasks on Swedish, in Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer Assisted Language Learning (NLP4CALL 2023) / edited by David Alfter, Elena Volodina, Thomas François, Arne Jönsson and Evelina Rennes, pages 94-101
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Gerlof Bouma, Robin Kurtz, Felix Morger, Joey Öhman, Yvonne Adesam, Lars Borin, Dana Dannélls, Markus Forsberg, Tim Isbister, Anna Lindahl, Martin Malmsten, Faton Rekathati, Magnus Sahlgren, Elena Volodina, Love Börjeson, Simon Hengchen, Nina Tahmasebi (2023): Superlim: A Swedish Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark, in Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, December 6-10, 2023, Singapore / Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali (Editors), pages 8137-8153
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Viktor Erbro (2023): You say tomato, I say the same: A large-scale study of linguistic accommodation in online communities, in Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa), pages 415-424
Evie Coussé, Yvonne Adesam, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2023): Inget stöd i forskningen för att de/dem slås ut, in Svenska Dagbladet, issue 2023-03-20
Katharina Ehret, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Christian Bentz, Alice Blumenthal-Dramé (2023): Measuring language complexity: challenges and opportunities, in Linguistics Vanguard, volume 9, pages 1-8

2022

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Yvonne Adesam, Evie Coussé (2022): We may actually all die tomorrow... nevertheless: Predicting short-term frequency changes in Swedish neologisms, in Live and learn: Festschrift in honor of Lars Borin / Editors: Elena Volodina, Dana Dannélls, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Markus Forsberg, Shafqat Virk, pages 5-12
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Arturs Semenuks (2022): Imperfect language learning reduces morphological overspecification: Experimental evidence, in PLoS ONE, volume 17, issue 1, pages 1-26
Elena Volodina, Dana Dannélls, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Markus Forsberg, Shafqat Virk (2022): Live and Learn- Festschrift in honor of Lars Borin

2021

Yvonne Adesam, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2021): Part-of-speech tagging of Swedish texts in the neural era, in Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, NoDaLiDa, May 31–2 June, 2021, Reykjavik, Iceland (online) / eds Simon Dobnik and Lilja Øvrelid, pages 200-209
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2021): Successes and failures of Menzerath’s law at the syntactic level, in Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2021), 21–25 March, 2022, Sofia, Bulgaria / Radek Čech, Xinying Chen (eds.), pages 17-33
Ali Basirat, Marc Allassonnière-Tang, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2021): An empirical study on the contribution of formal and semantic features to the grammatical gender of nouns, in Linguistics Vanguard, volume 7, issue 1
Katharina Ehret, Alice Blumenthal-Dramé, Christian Bentz, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2021): Meaning and Measures: Interpreting and Evaluating Complexity Metrics, in Frontiers in communication, volume 6
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Alexander Piperski (2021): Tri skljanki popoludni i drugie zadachi po lingvistike

2020

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2020): Older English Words Are More Polysemous, in The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (EvoLang13). Pp. 14-21, pages 14-21
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Karsten Schmidtke-Bode, Ilja Seržant (2020): Subjects tend to be coded only once: Corpus-based and grammar-based evidence for an efficiency-driven trade-off, in Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories, TLT 2020, 27–28 October 2020, Düsseldorf, Germany, pages 79-92
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Alexander Piperski (2020): Corpus evidence for word order freezing in Russian and German, in Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2020), December 13, 2020, Barcelona, Spain (Online) / Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Miryam de Lhoneux, Joakim Nivre, Sebastian Schuster (Editors)., pages 26-33
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2020): Foreigner-directed speech is simpler than native-directed: Evidence from social media, in Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science, NLP+CSS 2020, November 20, 2020, Online. Pp. 163-172, pages 163-172
Hartger Veeman, Marc Allassonnière-Tang, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Ali Basirat (2020): Cross-lingual Embeddings Reveal Universal and Lineage-Specific Patterns in Grammatical Gender Assignment, in Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Online, November 19-20, 2020. Pp. 265-275, pages 265-275
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Hanne Eckhoff (2020): A Diachronic Treebank of Russian Spanning More Than a Thousand Years, in Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), May 11-16, 2020, Marseille, France / ed. Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair)., pages 5251-5256
Sean Roberts, Anton Killin, Angarika Deb, Catherine Sheard, Simon Greenhill, Kaius Sinnemäki, José Segovia-Martin, Jonas Nölle, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Archie Humphreys-Balkwill, Hannah Little, Cristopher Opie, Guillaume Jacques, Lindell Bromham, Peeter Tinits, Robert Ross, Sean Lee, Emily Gasser, Jasmine Calladine, Matthew Spike, Stephen Mann, Olena Shcherbakova, Ruth Singer, Shuya Zhang, Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Christian Kliesch, Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun, Hedvig Skirgård, Monica Tamariz, Sam Passmore, Thomas Pellard, Fiona Jordan (2020): CHIELD: the causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database, in Journal of Language Evolution, volume 5, issue 2, pages 101–120
Yvonne Adesam, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Felix Morger (2020): SwedishGLUE – Towards a Swedish Test Set for Evaluating Natural Language Understanding Models
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2020): Pizzas and vermouth, in The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book: Lexical perplexities and cracking conundrums from across the globe, pages 150-151
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2020): Kogda morfologija bessil'na, in VAProsy jazykoznanija: megasbornik nanostatej, pages 56-60
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Arturs Semenuks (2020): Different trajectories of morphological overspecification and irregularity under imperfect language learning, in The Complexities of Morphology / edited by Peter Arkadiev and Francesco Gardani, pages 283-305

2018

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Çağrı Çöltekin, Katharina Ehret, Kilu von Prince, Daniel Ross, Bill Thompson, Chunxiao Yan, Vera Demberg, Gary Lupyan, Taraka Rama, Christian Bentz (2018): Using Universal Dependencies in cross-linguistic complexity research, in Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018), 8–17
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Christian Bentz (2018): Proceedings of the First Shared Task on Measuring Language Complexity

2017

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2017): M. Baerman, D. Brown, G. G. Corbett (eds.). Understanding and measuring morphological complexity, in Voprosy jazykoznanija - Journal of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, issue 5, pages 123-135

2016

Christian Bentz, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2016): Learning pressures reduce morphological complexity: Linking corpus, computational and experimental evidence, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC at COLING 2016): 222–232
Hanne Eckhoff, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2016): Automatic parsing as an efficient pre-annotation tool for historical texts, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities (LT4DH at COLING 2016): 62–70.
Hanne Eckhoff, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2016): From diachronic treebank to dictionary resource: the Varangian Rus' project, in Proceedings of the EURALEX 2016 conference: 335–340
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Hanne Eckhoff, Tatjana Gavrilova (2016): The beginning of a beautiful friendship: rule-based and statistical analysis of Middle Russian, in Computational linguistics and intellectual technologies. Papers from the annual international conference "Dialogue", 15: 99–111
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Hanne Eckhoff (2016): Redundant features are less likely to survive: empirical evidence from the Slavic languages, in The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11), 69–77

2015

Hanne Eckhoff, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2015): Linguistics vs. digital editions: The Tromsø Old Russian and OCS Treebank, in Scripta & e-Scripta, issue 14-15, pages 9-25
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2015): Estimating Grammeme Redundancy by Measuring Their Importance for Syntactic Parser Performance, in Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning, 65–73
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Hanne Eckhoff (2015): Automatic identification of shared arguments in verbal coordinations, in Computational linguistics and intellectual technologies. Papers from the annual international conference "Dialogue", 14: 33–43

2014

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Hanne Eckhoff (2014): Verbal constructional profiles: reliability, distinction power and practical applications, in In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories, 2–13
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Vera Zvereva (2014): Slangs Go Online, or The Rise and Fall of the Olbanian language, in Digital Russia: The Language, Culture and Politics of New Media Communication, pages 122-140
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2014): The written turn: how computer-mediated communication actuates linguistic change in Russian, in Digital Russia: The Language, Culture, and Politics of New Media Communication, pages 107–122
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2014): "Ty chto-to pechatala, ja tebja perebil": igra so strukturoj dialoga v kvazisinxronnoj kommunikacii, in Sovremennyj russkij jazyk v internete, pages 61-82
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2014): Predictors of pluricentricity: lexical divergences between Latvian Russian and Russian Russian, in The Russian Language Outside the Nation, pages 225–246

2013

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2013): Language Change Online: Linguistic Innovations in Russian Induced by Computer-Mediated Communication

2012

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2012): Introducing pressure for expressivity into language evolution experiments, in The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, 64-71
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2012): «Orfograficheskij» srednij rod: grammaticheskaja innovacija v jazyke russkogo Interneta, in Variativnost’ v jazyke i kommunikacii, pages 51–72
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2012): Jazykovaja slozhnost’, in Voprosy jazykoznanija - Journal of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, issue 5, pages 101-124

2011

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2011): E-mail vs. Chat: The influence of the communication channel on the language, in Computational linguistics and intellectual technologies. Papers from the annual international conference "Dialogue","Dialogue", 10: 84-93
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Aleksandr Piperski (2011): Doubts About a Serial Founder-Effect Model of Language Expansion, in Science

2007

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2007): Punktuacija kak sredstvo razreshenija neodnoznachnosti, in Struktury i interpretacii: raboty molodyx issledovatelej po teoreticheskoj i prikladnoj lingvistike, pages 11-32
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Boris Iomdin (2007): Rol' punktuacii v razreshenii neodnoznachnosti, in Komp'juternaja lingvistika i intellektual'nye texnologii (Dialogue-2007). Trudy konferencii, 44–49
Boris Iomdin, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2007): Combinations of Probability Qualifiers in Russian, in Meaning - Text theory 2007: proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Meaning - Text Theory, 189-198

2006

Boris Iomdin, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2006): A kto ètot ètot? Imena sobstvennye i opredelennaja neopredelennost’, in Komp'juternaja lingvistika i intellektual'nye texnologii (Dialogue- 2006). Trudy konferencii, 196–201.

2005

Igor Boguslavsky, Leonid Iomdin, Alexander Lazursky, Leonid Mityushin, Viktor Sizov, Leonid Kreydlin, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2005): Interactive Resolution of Intrinsic and Translational Ambiguity in a Machine Translation System, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (3406)
Igor Boguslavskij, Leonid Iomdin, Aleksandr Lazurskij, Leonid Mitjushin, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (2005): Interaktivnoe razreshenie neodnoznachnosti razlichnyx tipov v mashinnom perevode, in In Komp'juternaja lingvistika i intellektual'nye texnologii (Dialogue-2005). Trudy konferencii, 216–221.
Aleksandr Lazurskij, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Leonid Krejdlin, Leonid Mitjushin, Viktor Sizov (2005): Interaktivnoe razreshenie leksicheskoj i sintaksicheskoj neodnoznachnosti v sistemah avtomaticheskoj obrabotki estestvennogo jazyka, in Internet-matematika 2005: sistemy obrabotki veb-dannyh, pages 44-66

2004

Ivan Derzhanski, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Kseniya Gilyarova, Boris Iomdin, Maria Rubinshtein (2004): O perevodimosti lingvisticheskih zadach: Uroki Pervoj mezhdunarodnoj lingvisticheskoj olimpiady, in Komp'juternaja lingvistika i intellektual'nye texnologii (Dialogue-2004). Trudy konferencii, 166–171.