FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

My favourite neologism is “stonks,” a playful re-spelling of “stocks” that emerged from English-speaking online meme culture. It uses a slight phonetic shift to transform a standard financial term into a humorous commentary on market dynamics, reflecting the absurdity sometimes seen in economic trends. Originating around the past decade in digital spaces, “stonks” exemplifies how internet communities creatively bend language rules to convey a mix of irony and critique. This neologism captures the role of digital communication in driving lexical innovation.

I am Diego Rossini, a researcher in Natural Language Processing with a strong focus on lexical innovation. My PhD project, “Understanding Lexical Innovation Across Societies,” investigates how new words are created, diffused, and adopted in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. It explores digital platforms and social networks as engines of neologism formation in high-resource languages, while also examining word creation processes in low-resource, hunter-gatherer societies. Leveraging advanced NLP techniques, computational modeling, and ontology-based knowledge injection, my work aligns closely with ENEOLI’s mission to unravel the evolution of language.
More about my research can be found on my USI webpage (https://search.usi.ch/en/people/2abbc0545da785823e2a6bab076e2c3f/rossini-diego) and personal portfolio (https://diegorossini.github.io/).