Training & continuing education

Digital Tools for the Diachronic Analysis of Language / Ψηφιακά Εργαλεία για τη Διαχρονική Ανάλυση της Γλώσσας, KEDIVIM at NKUA, autumn 2026

For all parts of this platform (site, tools, corpus, slides, launch report) please cite:

Lavidas, Nikolaos, Kiki Nikiforidou, Dag Haug, Leonid Kulikov, Vassiliki Geka, Vassileios Symeonidis, Theodoros Michalareas, Sofia Chionidi, Anastasia Tsiropina, Eleni Plakoutsi, and Evangelos Argyropoulos. 2026. AthDGC: Athens Digital Glossa Chronos (A platform of computational tools and a diachronic Greek treebank, with Indo-European parallels). Athens: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Zenodo (an open research-data repository hosted at CERN that mints permanent DOIs). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20439182

KEDIVIM course at NKUA, autumn 2026 intake

The AthDGC platform is taught as a continuing-education course at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), through the NKUA Centre for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (KEDIVIM / KEΔIΒIM).

Course title (Greek): Ψηφιακά Εργαλεία για τη Διαχρονική Ανάλυση της Γλώσσας

Course title (English): Digital Tools for the Diachronic Analysis of Language

When: Autumn 2026 (October, December 2026)

Language: Greek (primary) with English-language sessions and materials.

Level: Open to BA students, MA students, PhD students, and post-doctoral researchers from a wide range of backgrounds, including linguistics, philology, classical studies, digital humanities, computer science, computational linguistics, history, and related fields. No prior NLP background required.

Director: Prof. Nikolaos Lavidas (NKUA, Division of Language-Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, School of Philosophy).

Registration: via the NKUA KEDIVIM portal at https://elearn.elke.uoa.gr/ (course code forthcoming on the official KEDIVIM listing for autumn 2026).

What you will learn

The course pairs theoretical instruction in diachronic Indo-European linguistics with hands-on practice on the AthDGC platform. By the end you will be able to:

  • read PROIEL (the dependency-treebank (a collection of sentences whose grammatical structure has been analysed and stored) standard for early Indo-European languages, developed at Oslo) XML 2.0 (the file format that stores each sentence as a tree of word-by-word grammatical relations, developed at Oslo) annotation fluently across all diachronic periods of Greek (Archaic through Modern);
  • query the AthDGC corpus via the NoSketch-style concordancer (a search tool that shows every occurrence of a word in its surrounding context) and the Neo4j (a graph database that stores data as nodes and connections rather than as tables) cross-lingual alignment graph (a database that records which token in language A corresponds to which token in language B);
  • export AthDGC slices into LightSIDE (an open-source text-mining workbench developed at Carnegie Mellon)-AthDGC (the Lavidas-extension fork of LightSIDE that operates on syntactic features rather than only text features), train classifiers on syntactic features (PROIEL dependency arcs (the head-to-dependent links between words in a parsed sentence), argument-structure frames, morphology bundles), and inspect which diachronic syntactic patterns drive the classifier's decisions;
  • adapt the AthDGC workflow (Stanza (Stanford's open-source Python workflow that automatically tags, lemmatises, and parses sentences) checkpoints (saved snapshots of a trained model), corpus-fix toolkit, PROIEL XML 2.0 exporter) to your own historical-treebank project;
  • contribute back to AthDGC through the public GitHub repository.

Detailed syllabus

The seven-module structure below is the planned outline for autumn 2026. The official syllabus, ECTS load, and lecture schedule will be confirmed on the KEDIVIM listing closer to term start.

  • Module 1. Introduction to diachronic Indo-European linguistics and to AthDGC as a platform.
  • Module 2. PROIEL XML 2.0 annotation: reading and verifying dependency parses.
  • Module 3. Argument structure (the set of obligatory and optional partners a verb requires, e.g. subject, object, oblique) across Greek diachrony: from Homer to Modern.
  • Module 4. Cross-lingual NT alignment (Greek, Latin, Gothic, OCS, Armenian).
  • Module 5. LightSIDE-AthDGC for syntactic classification of diachronic stages.
  • Module 6. NoSketch concordancer + Neo4j alignment-graph queries.
  • Module 7. Final project: a short paper or notebook using AthDGC data and tools.

Fees, certificates, contact

Fees, certificate code, and ECTS recognition will be confirmed on the official KEDIVIM listing closer to term start.

For questions about course content: nlavidas@enl.uoa.gr.

For administrative questions about KEDIVIM registration: kedivim@uoa.gr.

Workshops, talks, and short courses

The AthDGC team also delivers shorter formats at partner institutions and at international conferences:

  • one-hour LightSIDE-AthDGC for syntax workshops;
  • conference demos at LREC-COLING 2026, DH2026, CIDL 2026, and CIVIS alliance member institutions;
  • bespoke training sessions for individual research groups (contact PI).

Funding

Funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) under the 3rd Call for HFRI Research Projects to support Post-Doctoral Researchers, Project No. 20577; with complementary support from the Greece 2.0 National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Compute supplied by GRNET ARIS (the Greek national high-performance computing cluster, run by GRNET) (Greek national HPC (high-performance computing, i.e. a cluster of fast machines used for heavy computation)), allocation pa260305.