Neo is an interdisciplinary digital humanities research project aiming at the semi-automatic detection and analysis of contemporary neology. It results from the convergence of new language practices of the modern web (creation of new words or emergence of new senses) and recent advances in natural language processing, notably via lexicographic methods. This project combines the text mining skills of computer scientists with the experience of studying the neologisms of researchers in applied linguistics.

The project also relies on a close collaboration with the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française et aux Langues de France (DGLFLF) of the Ministry of Culture, which is associated with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) to develop the exploitation of the archives of the legal deposit of the web, archives that we will use for the constitution of our corpus.

The project revolves around several tasks :

– The implementation of an interface to exploit the legal deposit data of the Web,
– Detection of morphological and semantic neologisms,
– The interpretation of neologisms.