In September, TRIFECTA PhD Candidate Jiaqi visited two researchers Dr. Albert Meroño-Peñuela and Dr. Barbara McGillivray at King’s College in London for two weeks.
Jiaqi would like to explore semantic change detection for her thesis and this paper co-authored by King’s researchers looks very interesting to her (https://aclanthology.org/2022.evonlp-1.7/). Thanks to her supervisor Marieke’s support, she spent two weeks sitting in the postgraduate office of King’s Department of Informatics with other PhD students there, working together with Dr. Nitisha Jain, and exploring London after work (e.g., a West End musical, a jazz club live in Soho, a classic movie at Prince Charles Cinema, and museum visits etc).
After introducing herself to Kings’ people and having discussions with Albert, Barbara, and Nitisha on how to make the best of this visit, Jiaqi started to work on improving a previous semantic drift paper finished by Albert, Barbara, Nitisha, and Jongmo by conducting topic modelling and adding annotations. Since this paper deals with semantic change in the disability domain (how disability-related words evolving societal attitudes can influence the perpetuation of harmful language that reinforces stereotypes and discrimination), Jiaqi also designed an annotation framework for the offensiveness of disability-related words. She also tried to apply Jongmo’s code to her VOC data to see what would happen.
Although it is a short visit, we are happy to proceed with what we have done during these two weeks and collaborate further in the future. It was also a nice experience for Jiaqi to experience a different work culture from the HuC and talk to other PhD peers to know what they are working on and practical things like how the PhD is structured at King’s/how they feel so far.
Fueled up again!