Toward Phylogenies of Word Sense: Tracing the Cultural Evolution of Meaning in 2,500 Years of Greco-Latin Thought Through Contextual Word Embeddings
 
Bio/Abstract: Vojtěch Kaše is a social scientist exploring the long-term dynamics of human cultures through computational modeling and naturalistic theory. He is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic.

In this talk, he introduces his ongoing efforts to adapt contextual language models for studying semantic change in ancient Greek and Latin. Drawing on recent experiments with fine-tuned transformer architectures, he discusses how large-scale semantic modeling can reveal the evolutionary trajectories of ideas across 2,500 years of Greco-Latin textual history — outlining both the methodological challenges and the broader promise of constructing “phylogenies of word sense.”

This event is a collaboration between Humlab and the higher seminar in religion and theology.