Deutsch Intern
Graduiertenschule für die Geisteswissenschaften

Hagen, Thora

Dissertationsthema:
"Improving the Representation of Semantic Relations and Semantic Change using Language Models with Knowledge Graphs in Low-Resource Scenarios."

Kontaktadresse an der Universität Würzburg:
Lehrstuhl für Computerphilologie
und Neuere Deutsche Literaturgeschichte
Campus Hubland Nord
Emil-Hilb-Weg 23
97074 Würzburg

E-Mail an Frau Hagen

Erstbetreuer:  Prof. Dr. Fotis Jannidis

Zweitbetreuende: 

Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho

Dr. Barbara McGillivray (King's College London)

Klasse in der Graduiertenschule: "Digital Humanities"

Promotion in der Graduiertenschule ab WS 2024/25.

Abstract:
The dissertation analyzes the enrichment of pre-trained language models and word embeddings with knowledge graphs. Typically, the relationships between words in a language model are based "only" on distributional semantics; through training on a large text corpus. Frequently co-occurring words are closer to each other in the vector space, and in this way, word associations can be mapped in the model. However, not all meaningful word relations are frequently expressed in the form of continuous text and may therefore be inadequately represented. Structured knowledge in the form of graphs can  help to reinforce word relations, in particular when there is not enough training data in the form of continuous text available to create a stable language model.

To be precise, this work will investigate how the injection of knowledge graphs can improve the representation of semantic relations that exist between words in language models, in particular word similarity, word association, and lexical entailment. Another kind of word relation, semantic change, which can be interpreted as the relation of a word to itself, will be highlighted as a special low-resource use case by first creating and then utilizing a historical knowledge graph for the injection process.