Jelena Prokic
Assistant Professor
- Name
- Dr. J. Prokic
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 4158
- j.prokic@hum.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0003-2928-7271
Jelena Prokic is an Assistant Professor at the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities. Her research focus is on the use of computational methods in the study of language, with emphasis on quantitative approaches to language variation and change.
Jelena Prokic relies on computational methods to explain how and why language changes and discover language internal and external factors that lead to observed change. She specializes in variation on the micro-level, where she is particularly interested in automatic dialect detection, automatic feature extraction and dynamics of language variation. She investigates problems related to formation, maintenance and evolution of dialects and their stability through time. She is dedicated to developing digital databases, tools and methods that would assist researchers in contributing to a theory of natural language and shed more light on language evolution, and eventually on human cognition, society and history. In her work she applies methods from natural language processing, machine learning, corpus linguistics and GIS.
Jelena holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Groningen, MA degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Tübingen and Diploma in Chinese Language and Literature from the University of Belgrade. After her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Munich and the University of Marburg. She participated in various projects where she explored the potentials of digital methods and tools in the humanities. Her work includes projects on quantitative approaches to diversity of Bulgarian dialects (Buldialect), phylogeny of Native South American languages (QuantHistLing), digitization of German dialect data (Alignments of the PAD), automatic detection and analysis of the spread of neologisms in English (Incipient diffusion of lexical innovations) and development of the first digital phonetic database for computational historical linguistics and dialectometry (BDPA).
For more information see her personal website.
Assistant Professor
- Faculty of Humanities
- Leiden Univ Centre for Linguistics
- LUCL Nederlands
- Nerbonne J., Heeringa W., Prokic J. & Wieling M. (2021), Dialectology for computational linguists. In: Zampieri M. & Nakov P. (Eds.) Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects: A Computational Perspective. Studies in Natural Language Processing Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 96-118.
- Heeringa W. & Prokic J. (2018), Computational dialectology. In: Boberg C., Nerbonne J. & Watt D. (Eds.) Handbook of Dialectology. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell. 330-347.
- Kerremans D. & Prokic J. (2018), Mining the web for new words: semi- automatic neologism identification with the NeoCrawler, Anglia 136(2): 239-268.
- Würschinger Q., Prokic J., Kerremans D. & Schmid H.J. (2018), The dynamics of Lexical Innovation: Data, Methods, Models, Pragmatics and Cognition 25(1): 1-7.
- Kerremans D., Prokic J., Würschinger Q. & Schmid H.J. (2018), Using data-mining to identify and study patterns in lexical innovation on the web: The NeoCrawler, Pragmatics and Cognition 25(1): 174-200.
- Prokic J. (2017), Quantitative diachronic dialectology. In: Wieling M., Kroon M., Noord G.van & Bouma G. (Eds.) From Semantics to Dialectometry. no. 32 UK: College Publications. 293-302.
- List J.M. & Prokic J. (2014), A benchmark database of phonetic alignments in historical linguistics and dialectology. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Reykjavik, Iceland: European Language Resources Association (ELRA). 288–294.
- Prokic J. & Nerbonne J. (2013), Analyzing dialects biologically. In: Fangerau H., Geisler H., Halling T & Martin W. (Eds.) Classification and Evolution in Biology, Linguistics and the History of Science. Concepts - Methods - Visualization.: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH. 147-161.
- Prokic J. & Moran S. (2013), Black box approaches to genealogical classification and their shortcomings. In: Saxena A. & Borin L. (Eds.) Approaches to Measuring Linguistic Differences. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
- Prokic J. & Cysouw M. (2013), Combining regular sound correspondences and geographic spread, Language Dynamics and Change 3(2): 147-168.
- Moran S. & Prokic J. (2013), Investigating the genealogical relatedness of the endangered Dogon languages, Literary and Linguistic Computing 28(4): 676–691.
- Valls E., Nerbonne J., Prokic J., Wieling M., Clua E. & lloret M.R. (2012), Applying Levenshtein distance to Catalan dialects. A brief comparison of two dialectometrical approaches, Verba: Anuario galego de filoloxia 39: 35-61.
- Prokic J., Coltekin C. & Nerbonne J. (2012), Detecting shibboleths. In: Butt M., Carpendale S., Penn G., Prokic J. & Cysouw M. (Eds.) Proceedings of the EACL 2012 Joint Workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH.: Association for Computational Linguistics. 72-80.
- Butt M., Prokic J., Mayer T. & Cysouw M. (2012), Visualization of linguistic patterns and Uncovering language history from multilingual resources. In: Butt M., Carpendale S., Penn G., Prokic J. & Cysouw M. (Eds.) Proceedings of the EACL 2012 Joint Workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH. Avignon, France: Association for Computational Linguistics. 1-6.
- Prokic J. (29 November 2010), Families and Resemblances (PhD thesis, Faculty of Humanities, University of Groningen). Groningen: University of Groningen. Supervisor(s): Nerbonne J.
- Prokic J. & Cruys T. van de (2010), Exploring Dialect Phonetic Variation Using PARAFAC. In: Heinz J., Cahill L. & Wicentowski R. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 11th Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group on Computational Morphology and Phonology. Uppsala, Sweden: Association for Computational Linguistics. 46–53.
- Houtzagers P., Nerbonne J. & Prokic J. (2010), Quantitative and traditional classifications of Bulgarian dialects compared, Scando-Slavica 56(2): 163-188.
- Nerbonne J., Prokic J., Wieling M. & Gooskens C. (2010), Some further dialectometrical steps. In: Aurrekoexea G. & Ormaetxea J.L. (Eds.) Tools for linguistic variation. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco. 41-56.
- Wieling M., Prokic J. & Nerbonne J. (2009), Evaluating the pairwise string alignment of pronunciations. In: Borin L. & Lendvai P. (Eds.) Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on Language Technology and Resources for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education (LaTeCH – SHELT&R 2009). Athens, Greece: Association for Computational Linguistics. 26-34.
- Prokic J., Wieling M. & Nerbonne J. (2009), Multiple sequence alignments in linguistics. In: Borin L. & Lendvai P. (Eds.) Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on Language Technology and Resources for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education (LaTeCH – SHELT&R 2009). Athens, Greece. 18-25.
- Prokic J., Nerbonne J., Zhobov V., Osenova P., Simov K., Zastrow T. & Hinrichs E. (2009), The computational analysis of Bulgarian dialect pronunciation, Serdica Journal of Computing 3(3): 269–298.
- Prokic J. & Nerbonne J. (2008), Recognizing groups among dialects, International Journal Of Humanities and Arts Computing 2(1-2): 153-172.
- Prokic J. (2007), Application of phylogenetic methods on the dialect pronunciation data. In: Osenova P., Nerbonne J. & Hinrichs E. (Eds.) Proceedings of the RANLP Workshop on Computational Phonology.: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. 61-69.
- Prokic J. (2007), Identifying linguistic structure in a quantitative analysis of dialect pronunciation. In: BiemannC., Seretan V. & Riloff E. (Eds.) Proceedings of the ACL 2007 Student Research Workshop. Prague, Czech Republic: Association for Computational Linguistics. 61-66.
- Kübler S. & Prokic J. (2006), Why is German dependency parsing more reliable than constituent parsing?. In: Hajic J. & Nivre J. (Eds.) Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 2006). Prague, Czech Republic.
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