Something wicked this way comes: Analyzing language variation and change with MacBERTh

Abstract

This presentation demonstrates how MacBERTh may help researchers to (i) access and (ii) analyse the functional-semantic information encoded in linguistic corpus data in a (semi-)automatic way. More specifically, after surveying the performance of the model on general downstream NLP tasks, we home in on a specific case study in morphosyntactic variation in English ing-forms.