I study how language reflects changing understandings of socially important concepts, groups, and public issues. My work brings together natural language processing, computational social science, and social psychology to investigate changes in meaning, framing, and social evaluation.
I am a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Lea Frermann's Cognition and Communication Lab at the University of Tübingen, where I am developing research on how frames and social representations change over time — and what such shifts reveal about wider cultural and psychological change.
I received my PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2026, under the supervision of Prof. Nick Haslam and A/Prof. Ekaterina Vylomova, where I led the development of SIBling and LSC-Eval, computational frameworks for measuring and evaluating lexical semantic change, with social science applications. I also co-developed SenseRel, a benchmark for relations between word senses, and have conducted research on mental health language, stigma, identity, and dehumanization.
- Language & Cultural Change
- Diachronic Framing
- Lexical Semantic Change
- Computational Social Science
- Mental Health & Stigma
PhD, Social Psychology & Natural Language Processing
University of Melbourne
Graduate Diploma in Psychology (Advanced) with Honours
University of Melbourne
What can changes in language tell us about how societies understand socially important concepts, groups, and public issues? I draw on social psychology and linguistics alongside computational methods to investigate conceptual change and its relationship to broader social and cultural processes.
My research has three interconnected strands:
- Language and cultural change. I investigate how the meanings of socially important concepts change over time, including concept creep (the semantic expansion of harm-related concepts), and am extending this interest to how social groups and public issues are represented and framed over time.
- Computational methods and evaluation. I develop and evaluate interpretable methods and benchmarks for measuring distinct dimensions of lexical semantic change, with particular attention to construct validity.
- Social and psychological applications. I study mental health concepts, stigma, identity-related language, and dehumanization in historical texts and online discourse.
- Computational frameworks. I led the development of SIBling (ACL 2024), a general framework for measuring semantic change across Sentiment, Intensity, and Breadth, and LSC-Eval (Findings of ACL 2025), a framework for evaluating semantic change methods using LLM-generated data. I also co-developed the sense relations benchmark SenseRel (ACL 2026).
- Conceptual change in mental health. SIBling has been applied in multiple studies of semantic shifts in mental health concepts, including ADHD and schizophrenia, to investigate changes in semantic breadth, sentiment and intensity, which are relevant to testing concept creep theory. My earlier research also examined the semantic inflation of trauma.
- Social and psychological research. My work also examines dehumanization, identity-related language, and mental health stigma in public discourse.
- Research community. I have served as Program Chair of LChange'26 and Australian English co-lead for SemEval 2026 Task 7, alongside reviewing and programme committee service (NLP, Computational Social Science, Psychology).
