DFG Approves New Research Unit on Semantic Change
02.07.2026Grant Success: Our new DFG Research Unit "Bedeutungswandel in ressourcenarmen Domänen" has been officially approved! We are excited to develop new computational methods for the humanities.
We are thrilled to announce that the German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved our new Research Unit (FOR): "Bedeutungswandel in ressourcenarmen Domänen: Computational Humanities und Natural Language Processing im Dialog".
Led by the spokespersons Prof. Dr. Fotis Jannidis and Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho (University of Würzburg), the interdisciplinary project aims to develop innovative computational methods to detect and analyze semantic change. While modern Large Language Models (LLMs) require massive training datasets, this research unit focuses specifically on low-resource domains, bridging the gap between Natural Language Processing and humanities research questions.
In this project, we will develop methods to semi-automatically construct domain-specific knowledge graphs from language resources (such as dictionaries) and deeply integrate them with general-purpose language models. By leveraging both unstructured text and structured domain knowledge, our goal is to improve language representations in low-resource settings and make semantic shifts between language domains directly visible and interpretable.
We look forward to this collaborative journey!
Read the official press release on the DFG Website.
