Rate My Professor Dirk Speelman

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.