Keynote Speakers

Frazer Heritage is a corpus linguist with a particular interest in the representation of gender and sexuality across different forms of digital media. His primary research interest examines how corpus linguistics can be used to study videogames, newspapers, and social media.  Frazer has published several articles, many of which use corpus linguistic methods to explore videogames from different perspectives - these articles can be found in journals such as Game Studies, Discourse Context & Media, and Corpora. Furthermore, their published work includes two monographs – one in 2021 exploring corpus approaches to gender in videogames and a second at the end of 2023 which examines the language used by the incel community. Frazer is also the lead editor of the 2024 textbook "Analysing Representation", which focuses on the use of corpus linguistic methodologies in tandem with discursive analytical frameworks. 



A useful synergy or a black box of snake oil?: Applications of AI to the study of ludolinguistics

This keynote addresses the use of generative AI in the study of ludolinguistics, with a particular focus on potential synergies between AI and corpus linguistics. Three possible synergies are conceptualised and then tested using data generated from ChatGPT4. These potential synergies are: i) the use of AI to identify academic literature on ludolinguistics, ii) consulting AI to show trends in the language used within videogames and iii) the use of AI to analyse data from videogames. The findings demonstrate that ChatGPT4 often identifies scholars working in either ludography or linguistics but struggles to identify academics working on ludolinguistics. I also demonstrate that the AI models draw on outdated and unevidenced data to reach conclusions about the language within games. I take statements generated by ChatGPT4 about the language used by men and women in games and compare these to authentic corpus data. Such analysis reveals significant differences in authentic data compared to statements made by ChatGPT4. Finally, I demonstrate a low confidence in ChatGP4’s ability to categorise collocates. Ultimately, I argue that while ChatGPT4 offers some interesting avenues for future research – and the development of this tool presents an exciting prospect for academics, the use of such tools should be approached with extreme caution.