DESCRIPTION

The 2nd ENEOLI Training School will offer training in the field of lexical innovation by combining introductions to selected topics in neology with practical, hands-on sessions. The training is designed for young researchers (PhD students, post-docs and early career researchers up to 5 years after obtaining their PhD), who are interested in neology and its significance for fields like lexicography, terminology, historical and sociolinguistics, discourse studies, language planning and translation studies.
The four-day programme provides participants with the theoretical basis, key concepts, and essential skills for understanding and researching two more advanced topics in lexical innovation. The first two days will tackle the methodological challenges of studying semantic neology (new word senses) and will provide training in the detection and description of lexical semantic change. Days three and four will focus on the highly socially relevant topic of gender-related neology and will provide training on analysing and documenting the emergence of gender-related neology across languages and discourses. Overall, the training school provides a solid foundation for studying and describing different types of lexical innovation and equips participants for future involvement in the field.

Are you interested? The information on how to apply is available in this document. The deadline for the submission of applications is the 15th of February. The notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent by the 25th of February at the latest.

Travel reimbursement rules can be accessed here.

GOALS

The 2nd ENEOLI Training School promotes international collaboration by providing a platform for participants to share experiences, build networks, and foster long-term partnerships beyond the event.
It equips participants with key concepts and competencies for understanding and addressing specific types of lexical innovation, serving as a foundation for advanced work and future participation in research projects.

Through the combination of classes and workshops, participants will combine theoretical principles and methods, work on real data, and learn how to present different forms of lexical innovation.

Bucharest, Romania

 Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Department of Modern Languages & Business Communication

PROGRAM

The preliminary program can be downloaded here.

DAY 1 & 2: Lexical Semantic Change Detection

Trainers: Dominik Schlechtweg (Universität Stuttgart) & Emma Sköldberg (Göteborgs Universitet)

Aims and methods

Lexical Semantic Change Detection (LSCD) aims to automate the identification of word sense changes within diachronic text corpora. It has its applications in historical linguistics and lexicography, but also in the social sciences, where distinctions in language use across groups of interest (such as political parties) can help to provide evidence for research hypotheses. The training will first introduce the theoretical linguistic background on LSC (i.e., Lexical Semantic Change) [1, 2], and then move on to introduce the dominating approaches to measure LSC with humans and computers in computational linguistics [3, 4, 5]. The course will give a high-level overview of state-of-the-art computational approaches to LSCD based on fine-tuned language models and clustering algorithms, and include a discussion of our own recent work [6, 7] and user-friendly interfaces for LSCD [5].

Goals

The training will enable students to understand current technical approaches on a high level, to interpret model output and to apply models within their own research. The course will also provide insights and practical guidance on how analyses and findings of semantic variation and change in corpora can be applied in lexicography.

References

• [1] Blank, Andreas (1999), “Why do new meanings occur? A cognitive typology of the motivations for lexical Semantic change”, in Blank, Andreas; Koch, Peter (eds.), Historical Semantics and Cognition, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 61–90.
• [2] Geeraerts, D. (2020). Semantic Change. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics (eds D. Gutzmann, L. Matthewson, C. Meier, H. Rullmann and T. Zimmermann). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118788516.sem042  
• [3] Schlechtweg, D., Zamora-Reina, F.D., Bravo-Marquez, F. (2025) Sense through time: diachronic word sense annotations for word sense induction and Lexical Semantic Change Detection. Lang Resources & Evaluation 59, 1431–1465 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-024-09771-7 
• [4] Schlechtweg, D., Yadav, S. and Arefyev, N. (2025) The LSCD Benchmark: a Testbed for Diachronic Word Meaning Tasks https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00176 
• [5] Schlechtweg, D. et al. (2024). The DURel Annotation Tool: Human and Computational Measurement of Semantic Proximity, Sense Clusters and Semantic Change. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 137–149 https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-demo.15 
• [6]  Schlechtweg, D. et al. (2025). Automatic Non-recorded Sense Detection for Swedish through Word Sense Induction with fine-tuned Word-in-Context models. In Proceedings of eLex 2025. https://elex.link/elex2025/wp-content/uploads/eLex2025-11-Schlechtweg_etal.pdf 
• [7] Sköldberg et al. (2024) Revealing Semantic Variation in Swedish Using Computational Models of Semantic Proximity – Results From Lexicographical Experiments. In Proceedings of EURALEX 2024. https://euralex.org/publications/revealing-semantic-variation-in-swedish-using-computational-models-of-semantic-proximity-results-from-lexicographical-experiments/

DAY 3 & 4: Neology and Gender

Océane Foubert (Université de Picardie Jules Verne) & Anna Vacalopoulou (Ινστιτούτο Επεξεργασίας του Λόγου – Institute for Language & Speech Processing)

Aims and methods

This session provides a cross-linguistic introduction to gender-related neology in feminist linguistic, corpus linguistic, and psycholinguistic research and contemporary lexicographic practices, exploring how new words, pronoun systems, and inclusive forms emerge, evolve, and become conventionalised across different languages in different discourses. Participants will examine both lexical innovations (e.g., neopronouns, inclusive morphemes, orthographic symbols) and semantic shifts, while learning how dictionaries and corpora document these changes. Through hands-on case-studies, attendees will analyze real multilingual data, draft lexicographic micro-entries, and evaluate institutional responses to inclusive language. The seminar balances theoretical grounding with practical skills, offering a comprehensive overview of how gender, society, and language innovation interact in global contexts.

Goals

The training will equip participants with a clear understanding of how gender-related neology emerges across languages and discourses, how semantic shifts reshape meaning, and how lexicographers document and evaluate these changes. Participants will learn to analyze multilingual data, assess inclusive language forms in corpora, and draft lexicographic entries, gaining both theoretical insight and practical tools for working with gender-related linguistic innovation.

References

• Ehrlich, Susan, & King, Ruth. (1994). Feminist meanings and the (de)politicization of the lexicon. Language in Society, 23(1), 59–76.
• Foubert, Océane. (2023). “Neologisms in contemporary feminisms: for a redefinition of feminist linguistic activism.” GLAD!  15. 10.4000/glad.7722.
• Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro Antonio, & Tarp, Sven. (2022). “Critical Lexicography at Work: Reflections and Proposals for Eliminating Gender Bias in General Dictionaries of Spanish”. Lexikos, 32 (2), 105–132, 10.5788/32-2-1699.
• Ging, Debbie, Lynn, Theodore, & Rosati, Pierangelo. (2019). Neologising misogyny: Urban Dictionary’s folksonomies of sexual abuse. New Media & Society, 22(5), 838–856. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819870306
• Müller-Spitzer, Carolin. (2023). “Gender Stereotypes in Dictionaries: The Challenge of Reconciling Usage-based Lexicography with the Role of Dictionaries as Social Agents”. Lexikos, 33(2), 79–94, 10.5788/33-2-1843.
• Pauwels, Anne. (2003). Linguistic sexism and feminist linguistic activism. In Janet Holmes & Miriam Meyerhoff (Eds.), The handbook of language and gender (1st ed., pp. 550–569). Blackwell Publishing.
• Pettini, Silvia. (2021). “‘One is a woman, so that’s encouraging too’: The representation of social gender in ‘powered by Oxford’ online lexicography.” Lingue e Linguaggi, 44, 275–295, 10.1285/i22390359v44p275.
• Vacalopoulou, Anna. (2022). “Gender Stereotypes in Greek Children’s Dictionaries.” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, vol. 43 no. 1, pp. 167–192. Project MUSE, 10.1353/dic.2022.0003.