Belief states of vulnerable groups in crises in Latin America: sociolingustic and computational assessment

• Applicants: Olga Kellert, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Stavros Skopeteas
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2021 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468416293

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

The major aim of the project was to determine the role that the linguistic and cultural background of indigenous people from Latin America plays in processing of relevant information about COVID-19 disseminated by high-impact news outlets (henceforth Reference Corpus). This aim entailed the development of interdisciplinary methods (including sociolinguistic and computational metrics) for assessing belief states and measuring the degree to which these belief states mirror the Reference Corpus. Special attention was given to complement questionnaire-based data collections with more socially natural data-gathering methods (e.g. personal interview), which is particularly important in order to include individuals who are less accustomed to performing highly controlled tasks.

Publications

• Using neural topic models to track context shifts of words: a case study of COVID-related terms before and after the lockdown in April 2020. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 131-139. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  Kellert, Olga & Mahmud, Uz Zaman Md
  
• Linguistic variation on Twitter: A case study of Italian loanwords in the Spanish of South America. From Formal Linguistic Theory to the Art of Historical Editions, 347-360. V&R unipress.
  Kellert, Olga
  
• Probing sociodemographic influence on code-switching and language choice in Quebec with geolocation of tweets. Frontiers in Psychology, 14.
  Kellert, Olga
  
• Use of NLP in the Context of Belief states of Ethnic Minorities in Latin America. Proceedings of the Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP), 1-5. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  Kellert, Olga & Zaman, Mahmud
  
• Using Geolocated Tweets for Probing Language Geography and Migration. Language, Migration and Multilingualism in the Age of Digital Humanities, 129-138. De Gruyter.
  Kellert, Olga