2026
May – Team meeting at LREC 2026: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference in Palma de Mallorca (Spain)!
At LREC 2026: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Barbara McGillivray and Andrea Farina met at with two different papers. Barbara presented Linguistic Knowledge Graphs for Sense Prediction: A Case-study on Latin, co-authored with Eleonora Ghizzota (University of Bari Aldo Moro), Paola Marongiu (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, CNR-ILC), Pierpaolo Basile (University of Bari Aldo Moro), and Stefano Ferilli (University of Bari Aldo Moro), while Andrea presented PREMOVE in LiLa: Integrating Latin Preverbed Motion Verbs with WordNet and VerbNet, co-authored with Marco Passarotti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), Francesco Mambrini (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), Matteo Pellegrini (University of Surrey), Eleonora Litta (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), and Giovanni Moretti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore).
Such a wonderful occasion to discuss more about COALA in Palma de Mallorca!
Barbara McGillivray and Andrea Farina.
May – Presentation at LREC 2026: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference in Palma de Mallorca (Spain)!
At LREC 2026: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Andrea Farina presented work carried out thanks to the GOBLIN Cost Action with colleagues from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan): Marco Passarotti (also in the COALA Advisory Board), Francesco Mambrini, Matteo Pellegrini (University of Surrey), Eleonora Litta, Giovanni Moretti.
The paper titled PREMOVE in LiLa: Integrating Latin Preverbed Motion Verbs with WordNet and VerbNet is available at https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-294.
Andrea Farina.
May – Presentation at Semantic Annotation for the Ancient World Conference 2026 in Rethymno (Crete)!
At Semantic Annotation for the Ancient World Conference 2026, Andrea Farina and Barbara McGillivray presented some preliminary annotations results in their talk titled Annotating Semantic Features in a Diachronic Corpus of Latin: Strategies for a SemiAutomatic Approach.
Barbara McGillivray and Andrea Farina.
March – First team meeting at EACL 2026 in Rabat!
At EACL 2026, our core team – Barbara McGillivray, Andrea Farina, and Bastien Liétard – met for the first time in person!
Barbara was invited as a keynote speaker at the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL) workshop to present her keynote on Between Precision and Scale: Bridging Computational Methods and Humanistic Inquiry in Historical Semantics. In the same workshop, Andrea presented a paper titled Sense-Based Annotation of Geographical Nouns in Ancient Greek and Latin: A Diachronic Study with LLMs. Bastien participated in the same conference to present CALE: Concept-Aligned Embeddings for Both Within-Lemma and Inter-Lemma Sense Differentiation at the main conference. Although this paper was not linked to the COALA project, it was useful to bring the three members of the team together for the first time!
From left to right: Andrea Farina, Barbara McGillivray, Bastien Liétard.
March – Presentation at EACL 2026 in Rabat!
At the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL) workshop, part of EACL 2026 in Rabat (Morocco), Andrea presented the paper Sense-Based Annotation of Geographical Nouns in Ancient Greek and Latin: A Diachronic Study with LLMs, co-authored with Michele Ciletti (University of Foggia), Barbara McGillivray, and Andrea Ballatore (King’s College London).
The paper focused on the lexicalisation of geographical nouns in Latin and Ancient Greek using a diachronic, multi-genre corpus (8th cent. BCE – 2nd cent. CE) and Large Language Models for Word Sense Disambiguation.
Andrea Farina.
March – Invited talk at EACL 2026 in Rabat!
At the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL) workshop, part of EACL 2026 in Rabat (Morocco), Barbara was invited to present her talk Between Precision and Scale: Bridging Computational Methods and Humanistic Inquiry in Historical Semantics.
Her presentation investigated how to scale up the study of meaning change across centuries of texts while preserving the nuanced, culturally grounded interpretations that humanistic scholarship demands.
Barbara McGillivray.
March – Presentation at Historical Languages & AI in Berlin!
At Historical Languages & AI, Barbara presented her pitch Introducing the COALA project, where she described the project to a broad interdisciplinary audience working with historical languages.
Barbara McGillivray.
January – Invited talk at Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics and Cultural Analytics (QDLCA26) in London!
COALA makes its first appearance at King’s College London at Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics and Cultural Analytics: Data-Driven Insights into Language and Cultural Change! Barbara was invited to discuss Making a Quantitative Historical Linguistics Framework Work in Practice, officially launching COALA in its own home institution for the first time!
Barbara McGillivray.