Event Date: Thursday, 15 December, 2022
Location: 15:00-16:00, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera (II piano)
Speaker: Gosse Minnema (University of Groningen)
Title:Â Perspective Matters: Event Framing in Language and Society
Abstract: Â Different linguistic expressions can conceptualize the same event from different viewpoints by emphasizing certain participants over others. In my presentation, I will try to show that frame semantics, as a theory of linguistic understanding (Fillmore 1985), is useful for analyzing social perspective-taking on news events, in particular relating to societal power imbalances (e.g., between men and women, Italians and refugees, car drivers and pedestrians). Then, based on my own PhD work, I will show how several recent Natural Language Processing methodologies can be used to perform large-scale frame-based corpus analysis, predict how linguistic choices in news text influence people’s perception of events, and even help to suggest alternative perspectives on an event.
Gosse Minnema is a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In his research, he tries to build bridges between computational, cognitive, and social approaches to language, focusing specifically on the semantics of events and its relation to society