Dominik Schlechtweg
I did my PhD at the IMS (University of Stuttgart) working together with Sabine Schulte im Walde on automatic detection of lexical semantic change. I held a PhD scholarship from Konrad Adenauer Foundation. After my PhD I did a research internship with Katrin Erk at the University of Texas, Austin. From February 2022 to June 2025, I was an independent research group leader at the IMS (University of Stuttgart) working in the research program Change is Key!. Since July 2025, I am working as a postdoctoral researcher at the IMS (University of Stuttgart). I am also the leader of the PhiTag and DURel projects where we develop open source text annotation platforms.
Email, Github, Google Scholar, LinkedIn
Interests
- optimization of human text data annotation processes (see PhiTag and DURel)
- automation of lexicographic processes
- application of lexical semantic computational models
- statistical modeling of word meaning
Projects
- PhiTag: An open-source text annotation platform.
[link]
- DURel Tool: An annotation tool for semantic proximity between use pairs.
[slides] [poster] [blog] [link]
- Word Usage Graphs represent usages of a word as nodes in a graph which are connected by weighted edges representing (human-annotated) semantic proximity.
[blog] [link]
- Logic in Linguistics: I am developing ILIAS-based interactive learning materials for logic in linguistics including learning modules, pools of questions and corresponding paper handouts. Topics include Arguments and argument schemata, Sets, relations and functions, Propositional logic, Predicate logic and Theory of types with lambda operator. Feel free to approach me if you want to use them outside of ILIAS-Stuttgart. All materials are in German.
[link]
Talks (selected)
- DURel Annotation Tool: Human and Computational Measurement of Semantic Proximity, Sense Clusters and Semantic Change.
Invited Talk at Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, Culture e Mediazion at State University of Milan, Italy, March 28, 2025.
[slides] [link]
- Models of Word Usage Graphs for Lexical Semantic Change Detection and Cognitive Insights into Word Meaning.
Invited Talk at Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, March 20, 2025.
[slides] [link]
- Automatische Bedeutungswandelerkennung in der Computerlinguistik: Ein Überblick.
Invited Talk at Annual Meeting of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, Mannheim, Germany, March 11, 2025.
[slides] [link]
- Tutorial in Computational Linguistics: Lexical Semantic Change Detection.
Invited Talk at Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society, Mainz, Germany, March 4, 2025.
[slides] [link]
- Hands-On Tutorial: Labeling with LLM and Human-in-the-Loop.
Tutorial presentation at COLING, Abu Dhabi, UAE, January 19, 2025.
[link]
- DURel & PhiTag: Two public, open-source text annotation tools.
Invited Talk at Course “Ingénierie Linguistique” at University of Geneva, November 8, 2024.
[slides]
- Automatic Dictionary Induction.
Invited Talk at Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, UK, September 24, 2024.
- PhiTag - An open-source text annotation tool.
Invited Talk at Toloka AI, May 13, 2024.
[slides]
- Lexical Semantic Change Detection.
Invited Talk at Indiana University, Bloomington, January 18, 2024.
[slides] [video]
- Open Problems and Applications in Lexical Semantic Change Detection.
Invited Talk at Seminar course „Diachronic Language Models“ at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, December 19, 2023.
- The LSCD Benchmark – a test bed for diachronic meaning tasks.
Talk at Workshop on Computational models of diachronic language change, 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, September 7th, 2023.
[slides] [link]
- The operationalization of word senses.
Talk at Workshop on “Recent advances in ChangeIsKey!” in Stuttgart, Germany, August 24th, 2023.
[slides] [link]
- DURel Annotation Tool - Prospects on a Workbench for Lexicographers.
Talk at Kick-Off Event of the RJ Research Program “Change is Key!”, Gothenburg, September 8th, 2022.
[slides] [video]
- Human and Computational Measurement of Lexical Semantic Change.
Keynote Talk at 3rd Workshop on Computational Detection of Language Change 2022 @ ACL, Dublin, May 26th, 2022.
[slides] [link]
- Human and Computational Measurement of Lexical Semantic Change.
PhD Defense Talk at IMS, University of Stuttgart, March 24th, 2022.
[slides]
- DURel Annotation Tool.
Talk at StuTS 69 + TaCoS 2021 (Online), May 9th, 2021.
[slides] [poster] [video] [blog] [link]
- State-of-the-art models in lexical semantic change detection.
Invited Talk at SFB-TRR 161 (University of Konstanz), January 18th, 2021.
[slides] [link]
- Sparse Usage Graphs as Model for Word Meaning in Context.
Keynote Talk at 2nd Workshop on Computational Detection of Language Change 2020, University of Gothenburg, November 25th, 2020.
[slides] [link]
- Efficient Manual Word Sense Clustering on Historical Corpora.
Invited Talk at The Alan Turing Institute (London), November 11th, 2019.
- Second-order Co-occurrence Sensitivity of Skip-Gram with Negative Sampling.
Invited Talk at CIS, LMU Munich, July 24th, 2019.
[slides] [link]
- A Wind of Change: Detecting and Evaluating Lexical Semantic Change across Times and Domains.
Invited Talk at University of Helsinki, February 10th, 2019.
[slides] [link]
- Comparing Annotation Frameworks for Lexical Semantic Change.
Talk at 1st Workshop on Computational Detection of Language Change 2018, University of Gothenburg, November 7th, 2018.
[slides]
- Problems of DURel annotation measures for semantic change.
Talk at SemRel research group at IMS, University of Stuttgart, February 1st, 2018.
[slides]
Publications
- Automatische Bedeutungswandelerkennung in der Computerlinguistik: Ein Überblick. 2025.
Dominik Schlechtweg
Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache
[bib] accepted
- Automatic Non-recorded Sense Detection for Swedish through Word Sense Induction with fine-tuned Word-in-Context models. 2025.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Emma Sköldberg, Shafqat Mumtaz Virk, James White, Simon Hengchen
Electronic lexicography in the 21st century
[bib] accepted
- CoMeDi Shared Task: Median Judgment Classification & Mean Disagreement Ranking with Ordinal Word-in-Context Judgments. 2025.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Tejaswi Choppa, Wei Zhao, Michael Roth
Proceedings of Context and Meaning: Navigating Disagreements in NLP Annotation, 33-47
[pdf] [slides] [bib]
- Predicting Median, Disagreement and Noise Label in Ordinal Word-in-Context Data. 2025.
Tejaswi Choppa, Michael Roth, Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of Context and Meaning: Navigating Disagreements in NLP Annotation, 65-77
[pdf] [slides] [bib]
- ABDN-NLP at CoMeDi Shared Task: Predicting the Aggregated Human Judgment via Weighted Few-Shot Prompting. 2025.
Ying Xuan Loke, Dominik Schlechtweg, Wei Zhao
Proceedings of Context and Meaning: Navigating Disagreements in NLP Annotation, 122-128
[pdf] [poster] [bib]
- Hands-On Tutorial: Labeling with LLM and Human-in-the-Loop. 2025.
Ekaterina Artemova, Akim Tsvigun, Dominik Schlechtweg, Natalia Fedorova, Konstantin Chernyshev, Sergei Tilga, Boris Obmoroshev
arXiv
[pdf] [bib]
- More DWUGs: Extending and Evaluating Word Usage Graph Datasets in Multiple Languages. 2024.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Pierluigi Cassotti, Bill Noble, David Alfter, Sabine Schulte Im Walde, Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 14379-14393
[pdf] [slides] [poster] [video] [bib]
- TRoTR: A Framework for Evaluating the Re-contextualization of Text Reuse. 2024.
Francesco Periti, Pierluigi Cassotti, Stefano Montanelli, Nina Tahmasebi, Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 13972-13990
[pdf] [slides] [poster] [video] [bib]
- Sense Through Time: Diachronic Word Sense Annotations for Word Sense Induction and Lexical Semantic Change Detection. 2024.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Frank D. Zamora-Reina, Felipe Bravo-Marquez, Nikolay Arefyev
Language Resources and Evaluation
[pdf] [bib]
- The DURel Annotation Tool: Using fine-tuned LLMs to discover non-recorded senses in multiple languages. 2024.
Pauline Sander, Simon Hengchen, Wei Zhao, Xiaocheng Ma, Emma Sköldberg, Shafqat Mumtaz Virk, Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the Workshop on Large Language Models and Lexicography at 21st EURALEX International Congress Lexicography and Semantics
[pdf] [slides] [video] [bib]
- Revealing semantic variation in Swedish using computational models of semantic proximity: Results from lexicographical experiments. 2024.
Emma Sköldberg, Shafqat Mumtaz Virk, Pauline Sander, Simon Hengchen, Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the 21st EURALEX International Congress Lexicography and Semantics
[pdf] [slides] [video] [bib]
- Enriching Word Usage Graphs with Cluster Definitions. 2024.
Andrey Kutuzov, Mariia Fedorova, Dominik Schlechtweg, Nikolay Arefyev
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), 6189-6198
[pdf] [slides] [bib]
- The DURel Annotation Tool: Human and Computational Measurement of Semantic Proximity, Sense Clusters and Semantic Change. 2024.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Shafqat Mumtaz Virk, Pauline Sander, Emma Sköldberg, Lukas Theuer Linke, Tuo Zhang, Nina Tahmasebi, Jonas Kuhn, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, 137-149
[pdf] [poster] [video] [bib]
- Presence or Absence: Are Unknown Word Usages in Dictionaries?. 2024.
Xianghe Ma, Dominik Schlechtweg, Wei Zhao
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 42-54
[pdf] [bib]
- Towards Automating Text Annotation: A Case Study on Semantic Proximity Annotation using GPT-4. 2024.
Sachin Yadav, Tejaswi Choppa, Dominik Schlechtweg
arXiv
[pdf] [bib]
- Detection of Non-recorded Word Senses in English and Swedish. 2024.
Jonathan Lautenschlager, Simon Hengchen, Emma Sköldberg, Dominik Schlechtweg
arXiv
[pdf] [slides] [bib]
- The LSCD Benchmark: a Testbed for Diachronic Word Meaning Tasks. 2024.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Shafqat Mumtaz Virk, Nikolay Arefyev
arXiv
[pdf] [slides] [bib]
- ChiWUG: A Graph-based Evaluation Dataset for Chinese Lexical Semantic Change Detection. 2023.
Jing Chen, Emmanuele Chersoni, Dominik Schlechtweg, Jelena Prokic, Chu-Ren Huang
Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
[pdf] [slides] [bib]
- Human and Computational Measurement of Lexical Semantic Change. 2023.
Dominik Schlechtweg
University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
[pdf] [slides] [bib]
- LSCDiscovery: A shared task on semantic change discovery and detection in Spanish. 2022.
Frank D. Zamora-Reina, Felipe Bravo-Marquez, Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
[pdf] [slides] [video] [bib]
- DiaWUG: A Dataset for Diatopic Lexical Semantic Variation in Spanish. 2022.
Gioia Baldissin, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
[pdf] [slides] [poster] [video] [bib]
- Modeling Sense Structure in Word Usage Graphs with the Weighted Stochastic Block Model. 2021.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Enrique Castaneda, Jonas Kuhn, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of *SEM 2021: The Tenth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, 241-251
[pdf] [slides] [poster] [video] [bib]
- Lexical Semantic Change Discovery. 2021.
Sinan Kurtyigit, Maike Park, Dominik Schlechtweg, Jonas Kuhn, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
[pdf] [slides] [video] [bib]
- More than just Frequency? Demasking Unsupervised Hypernymy Prediction Methods. 2021.
Thomas Bott, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Findings)
[pdf] [video] [bib]
- Regression Analysis of Lexical and Morpho-Syntactic Properties of Kiezdeutsch. 2021.
Diego Frassinelli, Gabriella Lapesa, Reem Alatrash, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, 21-27
[pdf] [bib]
- DWUG: A large Resource of Diachronic Word Usage Graphs in Four Languages. 2021.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Nina Tahmasebi, Simon Hengchen, Haim Dubossarsky, Barbara McGillivray
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 7079-7091
[pdf] [slides] [poster] [video] [blog] [bib]
- Explaining and Improving BERT Performance on Lexical Semantic Change Detection. 2021.
Severin Laicher, Sinan Kurtyigit, Dominik Schlechtweg, Jonas Kuhn, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, 192-202
[pdf] [poster] [bib]
- Effects of Pre- and Post-Processing on type-based Embeddings in Lexical Semantic Change Detection. 2021.
Jens Kaiser, Sinan Kurtyigit, Serge Kotchourko, Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, 125-137
[pdf] [poster] [video] [bib]
- Challenges for Computational Lexical Semantic Change. 2021.
Simon Hengchen, Nina Tahmasebi, Dominik Schlechtweg, Haim Dubossarsky
Computational Approaches to Semantic Change
[pdf] [bib]
- CL-IMS @ DIACR-Ita: Volente o Nolente: BERT does not outperform SGNS on Semantic Change Detection. 2020.
Severin Laicher, Gioia Baldissin, Enrique Castaneda, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 7th evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech tools for Italian (EVALITA 2020)
[pdf] [bib]
- OP-IMS @ DIACR-Ita: Back to the Roots: SGNS+OP+CD still rocks Semantic Change Detection. 2020.
Jens Kaiser, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 7th evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech tools for Italian (EVALITA 2020)
[pdf] [slides] [video] [bib] Winning Submission!
- SemEval-2020 Task 1: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection. 2020.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Barbara McGillivray, Simon Hengchen, Haim Dubossarsky, Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
[pdf] [slides] [video] [bib]
- IMS at SemEval-2020 Task 1: How low can you go? Dimensionality in Lexical Semantic Change Detection. 2020.
Jens Kaiser, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sean Papay, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
[pdf] [poster] [bib]
- CCOHA: Clean Corpus of Historical American English. 2020.
Reem Alatrash, Dominik Schlechtweg, Jonas Kuhn, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 6958-6966
[pdf] [bib]
- Shared Task: Lexical Semantic Change Detection in German. 2020.
Adnan Ahmad, Kiflom Desta, Fabian Lang, Dominik Schlechtweg
CoRR
[pdf] [bib]
- Predicting Degrees of Technicality in Automatic Terminology Extraction. 2020.
Anna Hätty, Dominik Schlechtweg, Michael Dorna, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
[pdf] [video] [bib]
- Simulating Lexical Semantic Change from Sense-Annotated Data. 2020.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (EvoLang13)
[pdf] [bib]
- Time-Out: Temporal Referencing for Robust Modeling of Lexical Semantic Change. 2019.
Haim Dubossarsky, Simon Hengchen, Nina Tahmasebi, Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 457-470
[pdf] [poster] [bib]
- Second-order Co-occurrence Sensitivity of Skip-Gram with Negative Sampling. 2019.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Cennet Oguz, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 2019 ACL Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, 24-30
[pdf] [poster] [bib]
- A Wind of Change: Detecting and Evaluating Lexical Semantic Change across Times and Domains. 2019.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Anna Hätty, Marco del Tredici, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 732-746
[pdf] [slides] [poster] [bib]
- SURel: A Gold Standard for Incorporating Meaning Shifts into Term Extraction. 2019.
Anna Hätty, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the 8th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, 1-8
[pdf] [bib]
- Diachronic Usage Relatedness (DURel): A Framework for the Annotation of Lexical Semantic Change. 2018.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde, Stefanie Eckmann
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 169-174
[pdf] [slides] [poster] [bib]
- Distribution-based prediction of the degree of grammaticalization for German prepositions. 2018.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference (EVOLANGXII)
[pdf] [bib]
- Hypernyms under Siege: Linguistically-motivated Artillery for Hypernymy Detection. 2017.
Vered Shwartz, Enrico Santus, Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Valencia, Spain, 65-75
[pdf] [bib]
- German in Flux: Detecting Metaphoric Change via Word Entropy. 2017.
Dominik Schlechtweg, Stefanie Eckmann, Enrico Santus, Sabine Schulte im Walde, Daniel Hole
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, 354-367
[pdf] [bib]
- Exploitation of Co-reference in Distributional Semantics. 2016.
Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)
[pdf] [bib]
Supervision
- Frank David Zamora Reina. Lexical Semantic Change Detection in Spanish (PhD thesis).
- Sachin Yadav. XL-DURel: Finetuning Sentence Transformers for Ordinal Word-in-Context Classification (Master thesis).
- Silvia Cunico. Tackling Multilingual Unknown Sense Detection Using a Few-Shot Learning Approach with a Multi-Task Architecture (Master thesis). [slides]
- Nash Whaley. Human and Computational Measurement of Semantic Relations (Master thesis).
- Tejaswi Choppa. Supervised Semantic Proximity Noise and Disagreement Detection (Master thesis). [slides]
- Tuo Zhang. An ordinal formulation of the graded Word-in-Context task (Master thesis).
- Gioia Baldissin. Unsupervised detection of diatopic lexical semantic variation in Spanish (Master thesis). [slides]
- Reem Alatrash. Computational Analysis of Syntactic and Semantic Variation in Kiezdeutsch (Master thesis). [slides]
- Felix Blessing. Automatic Prioritization of Dictionary Update Candidates (Bachelor thesis).
- Julian Kaufmann. Usage Retrieval for Dictionary Headwords With Applications in Unknown Sense Detection (Bachelor thesis).
- Johannes Sax. Sense definition generation for unrecorded senses (Bachelor thesis).
- Louisa Graef. Erkennung binärer lexikalisch-semantischer Veränderungen (Bachelor thesis).
- Marcel Wolkober. CAPTCHA mechanisms using semantic NLU tasks (Bachelor thesis). [pdf] [slides]
- Jonathan Lautenschlager. Detection of non-recorded word senses (Bachelor thesis). [pdf] [slides]
- Lukas Theuer Linke. Testing the effect of using crowdsourced semantic proximity judgments in the process of human lexicographical word sense clustering (Bachelor thesis). [slides]
- Benjamin Tunc. Optimierung von Clustering von Wortverwendungsgraphen (Bachelor thesis). [pdf] [slides]
- Thomas Bott. Unsupervised Models of Hypernymy for German Subordinate Noun Phrases (Bachelor thesis). [slides]
- Sinan Kurtyigit. Lexical Semantic Change Discovery (Bachelor thesis). [pdf] [slides]
- Serge Kotchourko. Optimizing Human Annotation of Word Usage Graphs in a Realistic Simulation Environment (Bachelor thesis). [pdf] [slides]
- Jens Kaiser. Dimensionality and Noise in Models of Semantic Change Detection (Bachelor thesis). [pdf]
- Severin Laicher. Historical Word Sense Clustering with Deep Contextualised Word Embeddings (Bachelor thesis). [slides]
- Enrique Castaneda. Efficient Online Word-Sense Clustering on Human Relatedness Judgments (Bachelor thesis).
- Christian Bartsch. Predicting Synchronic and Diachronic Semantic Generality with Models of Hypernymy (Bachelor thesis).
- Sachin Yadav. Implementing and evaluating a computational annotator in PhiTag through prompting ChatGPT with task-specific data (Student project).
- Pauline Sander (Software developer)
- Jing Chen (Internship)
- Alex Astolfi (Internship)
- Vaibhav Jain (Internship)
- James White (Student researcher)
- Arshan Dalili (Student researcher)
- Kuan-Yu Lin (Student researcher)
- Tejaswi Choppa (Student researcher)
- Nash Whaley (Student researcher)
- Tuo Zhang (Student researcher)
- Andres Cabero (Student researcher)
- Pedro G. Bascoy (Student researcher)
- Nishan Chatterjee (Student researcher)
Teaching
- Logik und diskrete Strukturen für die Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Lecture, SS25, Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart
- Introduction to Bayesian statistics
Seminar + Project, WS24/25, Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart
- Logik und diskrete Strukturen für die Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Lecture, SS24, Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart
- Logik und diskrete Strukturen für die Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Lecture, SS23, Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart
- Lexical Semantic Change Detection
Seminar + Project, SS19, Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart
- Intensionale Logik
Seminar, WS17/18, Institute for Linguistics/German Studies, University of Stuttgart
- Formale Methoden
Seminar, SS17, Institute for Linguistics/German Studies, University of Stuttgart
- Intensionale Logik
Seminar, WS16/17, Institute for Linguistics/German Studies, University of Stuttgart
- Formale Methoden
Seminar, SS16, Institute for Linguistics/German Studies, University of Stuttgart