Rate My Professor Dirk Speelman

Dirk Speelman is a full professor of corpus linguistics and quantitative methodology at the Research Unit Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven. He is a key member of the Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL) research group, the Leuven Statistics Research Centre (LStat), and the KU Leuven Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Leuven.AI). Speelman's academic interests focus on the application of quantitative and computational techniques to linguistic analysis, encompassing computational corpus linguistics, computational lexicology, variational linguistics, distributional semantics, lectometry, register analysis, and digital humanities approaches such as stylometry, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. His research employs statistical methods and machine learning to investigate language variation, including quantitative measures for lexical and syntactic variation, prototype semantics, semantic change, and grammatical alternations across varieties and time periods. Speelman develops research software for computational corpus linguistics and contributes to methodological advancements in empirical linguistics.

In teaching, Speelman delivers courses on statistics for the humanities, data processing, corpus linguistics, linguistic surveys and experiments, and usage-based models of language. He has promoted numerous doctoral projects, such as 'Natiolectal variation in Dutch grammar: A data-driven approach' by Robbert De Troij (2017), 'Profile-based measures of lexical variation: Four case studies on variation in word choice between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch' by Jocelyne Daems (2012), 'Variation in Chinese analytic causative constructions across time and varieties' by Xiaoyu Tian (2020), and ongoing projects including 'Cognitive Verbs in Romanian—from Prototype Theory to Computational Analysis' (2025), 'The prototype structure of concept drift' by Angela Maria Gomez Zuluaga (2024), and 'Underlying dimensions in conceptual change' by Tat Bach Phan (2024). He completed a sabbatical project titled 'Distributional semantics meets Digital Humanities' in 2022. Notable publications include 'Mixed-Effects Regression Models in Linguistics' (co-edited with Kris Heylen and Dirk Geeraerts, 2018), 'Language attitudes revisited: Auditory affective priming' (Journal of Pragmatics, 2013), 'Lexical patterning in a construction grammar' (Constructions and Frames, 2009), and 'Profile-based linguistic uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties' (Computers and the Humanities, 2003). His work has significantly influenced quantitative approaches to language variation and usage-based linguistics.