Student conference: "Linguistic Complexity"

The study of linguistic complexity has a long history, and has gained momentum when George Zipf started to analyze distributions of word frequencies in the first half of the previous century. In this student mini-conference, we will approach complexity from two different angles: On the one hand, the relationship between the complexity of a language and the size and demographics of its speaker community will be analyzed on different levels of language. On the other hand, it will be demonstrated how linguistic properties related to linguistic complexity (such as word frequency distributions and vocabulary richness) can be exploited to infer the author of an unknown text. Thus, this mini-conference approaches the phenomenon of linguistic complexity both on the individual and the population level.

All projects presented at this mini-conference were conducted in the summer term 2021 in the course of the two seminars "Population size and linguistic complexity" and "Stylometry and authorship attribution". It takes place on Saturday, 19 June, 10:00 to 14:00, in Zoom.