Alexandros Tantos
Alexandros Tantos is an Associate Professor of Text and Computational Linguistics at the Department of Philology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). He completed his postgraduate studies in Natural Language Processing at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 2003. From 2004 to 2008, Alexandros contributed as a research associate to the SFB 471 project, Variation and Development in the Lexicon, while completing his PhD at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Upon returning to Greece in 2008, he taught Computational Linguistics at the Universities of Crete, Aegean, Thrace, and AUTH. In 2010, he was appointed as a Lecturer in Text Linguistics at AUTH. Since then, he has led multiple research initiatives, including the development of two significant linguistic resources for Greek: ESKEIMATH and C58. Between 2020 and 2023, he served as the scientific director for the project Latent Aspects in L2 Acquisition, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.). Currently, his research centers on computational semantics and pragmatics, the application of Large Language Models for first and second language learning and teaching, as well as corpus linguistics, with a strong focus on the development, maintenance, and utilization of linguistic resources.
Session
The computational humanities and social sciences (CHSS) increasingly rely on large, text-rich datasets – from digital corpora and learner corpora to discourse-annotated datasets and historical archives – yet researchers often struggle with the limitations of existing tools for large-scale data processing, modeling, and reproducibility. This minisymposium introduces Julia as a powerful, expressive, and high-performance solution for CHSS research. We showcase how Julia’s strengths (speed, a solid type system, first-class multiple dispatch, and seamless interoperability with Python and R) enable both rapid experimentation and production-grade analysis. Through case studies ranging from corpus statistics and collocation networks to mixed-effects modeling of experimental data and large-scale language data pipelines, we highlight existing Julia packages and other emerging ones such as TextAssociations.jl and demonstrate how Julia can substantially expand what researchers in the humanities and social sciences can achieve. The minisymposium aims to build bridges between Julia developers and CHSS scholars while fostering a new community of users working with rich textual, linguistic, and sociocultural data.
3 organizers: Alexandros Tantos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Julia Mueller (Universitaet Freiburg) and Axel Bohmann (Universitaet Koeln)