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@inProceedings{hammarlin-etal-2021-vaccine-307227,
	title        = {Vaccine hesitancy – trust and distrust in medical expertise and authorities},
	abstract     = {The increase of vaccine hesitancy is singled out by WHO as one of the ten most important and urgent threats to global health (https://www.who.int/emergencies/ten-threats-to-global-health-in-2019). Diseases like measles are returning in different parts of Europe, partly as a result of the activities of the anti-vaccination movement. The herd immunity in most Western countries is high but even a small decrease in vaccination would have immediate negative effects for the population. Sweden offers a perfect site for future anti-vaccination studies due to its high vaccination covering. A decline in the numbers of children vaccinated has had immediate effects. For example, the incident rate in the country of pertussis rose from 700 cases to 3,200 cases per 100,000 children in 4 years due to a rather small decrease in vaccinations. This constitutes a strong argument for the civic importance of the case.

The aim of this presentation is to introduce a new 4-year research project (2020–2023), independently financed by the Bank of Sweden Foundation (Riksbankens jubileumsfond), with the goal to investigate the role and importance of rumouring for the vaccination skepticism growing on the internet, and how it can be understood as an expression of civic engagement in the present digital times entailing crucial transformations for everyday civic culture. Theoretically, the project builds upon, and develop, media researcher Dahlgren’s work on civic culture and Kitta’s studies of the anti-vaccination movement. The overarching research question is: How have the everyday practice and experience of, and the conditions for, rumours been shaped and reshaped in the digital age, and what do these processes mean for civic engagement and participation? The project will offer an understanding of how everyday interaction on the internet has a powerful impact on the spreading of false information, which in the long run may challenge democracy. On a more concrete level the project will answer the following questions in relation to the case of vaccine skepticism: How are rumours about alleged risks and dangers of vaccination propagated and established on the internet? Are there specific patterns and correlations connecting topics, assumptions, myths, argumentation schemes, popularity and time? What do everyday practices, on- and offline, of rumouring mean for its adherents’ civic engagement in the anti-vaccination movement? Which are the civic implications of the spreading and circulation of vaccination hostile rumours on individual citizens and society at large?},
	booktitle    = {8th European Communication Conference (ECREA)},
	author       = {Hammarlin, Mia-Marie and Miegel, Fredrik and Borin, Lars and Kokkinakis, Dimitrios and Jaakonaho, Anna},
	year         = {2021},
}

@incollection{jatowt-etal-2021-computational-307061,
	title        = {Computational approaches to lexical semantic change: Visualization systems and novel applications},
	abstract     = {The purpose of this chapter is to survey visualization and user interface solutions for understanding lexical semantic change as well as to survey a number of applications of techniques developed in computational analysis of lexical semantic change. We first overview approaches aiming to develop systems that support understanding semantic change in an interactive and visual way. It is generally accepted that computational techniques developed for analyzing and uncovering semantic change are beneficial to linguists, historians, sociologists, and practitioners in numerous related fields, especially within the humanities. However, quite a few non-professional users are equally interested in the histories of words. Developing interactive, visual, engaging, and easy-to-understand systems can help them to acquire relevant knowledge.

Second, we believe that other fields could benefit from the research outcomes of computational approaches to lexical semantic change. In general, properly representing the meaning of terms used in the past should be important for a range of natural language processing, information retrieval and other tasks that operate on old texts. In the latter part of the chapter, we then focus on current and potential applications related to computer and information science with the underlying question: “How can modeling semantic change benefit wider downstream applications in these disciplines?”},
	booktitle    = {Computational approaches to semantic change },
	author       = {Jatowt, Adam and Tahmasebi, Nina and Borin, Lars},
	year         = {2021},
	publisher    = { Language Science Press},
	address      = {Berlin},
	ISBN         = {978-3-96110-312-6},
	pages        = {311--339},
}

@incollection{tahmasebi-etal-2021-survey-307058,
	title        = {Survey of computational approaches to lexical semantic change detection},
	abstract     = {Our languages are in constant flux driven by external factors such as cultural, societal and technological changes, as well as by only partially understood internal motivations. Words acquire new meanings and lose old senses, new words are coined or borrowed from other languages and obsolete words slide into obscurity. Understanding the characteristics of shifts in the meaning and in the use of words
is useful for those who work with the content of historical texts, the interested general public, but also in and of itself.

The findings from automatic lexical semantic change detection and the models of diachronic conceptual change are also currently being incorporated in approaches for measuring document across-time similarity, information retrieval from long-term document archives, the design of OCR algorithms, and so on. In recent years we have seen a surge in interest in the academic community in computational methods and tools supporting inquiry into diachronic conceptual change and lexical replacement. This article provides a comprehensive survey of recent computational
techniques to tackle both.},
	booktitle    = {Computational approaches to semantic change / Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen (eds.)  },
	author       = {Tahmasebi, Nina and Borin, Lars and Jatowt, Adam},
	year         = {2021},
	publisher    = { Language Science Press},
	address      = {Berlin},
	ISBN         = {978-3-96110-312-6 },
	pages        = {1--91},
}

@edited_book{tahmasebi-etal-2021-computational-306968,
	title        = {Computational approaches to semantic change},
	abstract     = {Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least  understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families.

Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans.

A major challenge presently is to integrate the hard-earned  knowledge and expertise of traditional historical linguistics with  cutting-edge methodology explored primarily in computational linguistics.

The idea for the present volume came out of a concrete response to this challenge.  The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (LChange'19), at ACL 2019, brought together scholars from both fields.

This volume offers a survey of this exciting new direction in the study of semantic change, a discussion of the many remaining challenges that we face in pursuing it, and considerably updated and extended versions of a selection of the contributions to the LChange'19 workshop, addressing both more theoretical problems —  e.g., discovery of "laws of semantic change" — and practical applications, such as information retrieval in longitudinal text archives.},
	editor       = {Tahmasebi, Nina and Borin, Lars and Jatowt, Adam and Xu, Yang and Hengchen, Simon},
	year         = {2021},
	publisher    = {Language Science Press},
	address      = {Berlin},
	ISBN         = {978-3-98554-008-2},
}

@inProceedings{virk-etal-2021-data-306964,
	title        = {A Data-Driven Semi-Automatic Framenet Development Methodology },
	abstract     = {FrameNet is a lexical semantic resource based on the linguistic theory of frame semantics. A number of framenet development strategies have been reported previously and all of them involve exploration of corpora and a fair amount of manual work. Despite previous efforts, there does not exist
a well-thought-out automatic/semi-automatic methodology for frame construction. In this paper we propose a data-driven methodology for identification and semi-automatic construction of frames. As a proof of concept, we report on our initial attempts to build a wider-scale framenet for the legal domain (LawFN) using the proposed methodology. The constructed frames are stored in a lexical database
and together with the annotated example sentences they have been made available through a web interface.},
	booktitle    = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, 1–3 September, 2021 / Edited by Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Ruslan Mitkov, Ivelina Nikolova-Koleva},
	author       = {Virk, Shafqat and Dannélls, Dana and Borin, Lars and Forsberg, Markus},
	year         = {2021},
	publisher    = {INCOMA},
	address      = {Shoumen, Bulgaria},
	ISBN         = {978-954-452-072-4},
}