Maria Kunilovskaya
linguistics, contrastive and computational

I am currently a postdoc with University of Saarland (Germany) working on modelling mediated language to explore the memory-surprisal trade-off hypothesis from information theory. My PhD (completed March 2023, supervisor: Prof. Mitkov, RGCL, UK) was on human translation quality estimation.
Before that I held an Associate Professor position at a Translation Studies department, lecturing in Translation Studies, Theoretical Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. I have a PhD (Candidate of Science) in Contrastive Linguistics (completed 2004, adviser: Prof. Brodovich, Saint Petersburg University).
A lot of my efforts were invested in building learner parallel and comparable corpora, as well as other language resources. I have extensive experience in setting up manual annotation experiments.
My research interests have shifted from corpus- and feature-based approaches to ML, modelling and representation learning. In the past few years, I was involved in several computational humanities projects.
Keywords:
- language modelling, information theory
- Python, machine learning, DL, distributional semantics
- computational humanities, data collection and analysis
- translation quality estimation, data annotation
- languages varieties, register studies, text complexity
Download curriculum vitae 2017-2024 publications
recent news
Feb 15, 2025 | – I have three (sic!) posters as the 1st author at an SBF1102-organised RAILS conference. Overachiever, ahem. Slavic intercomprehension, translation task difficulty, cognitive load factors in interpreting |
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Feb 4, 2025 | – (1) Had a throwback to the best part of my past life, when I gave a 90 min lecture as part of BA Vorlesung Perspektiven der Linguistik. Oh my, I miss that! (handout) (2) On the same day, 15 min after the lecture, I had to take the spoken part of the exam at German B2 level. That went surprisingly well. |
Jan 24, 2025 | – I am proud to be named an outstanding reviewer by COLING-2025 organizers: see a picture |
selected publications
- UM PressConfuse and Normalise: Authoritarian Propaganda in a High-Choice Media Environment during Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine2024
- EAMT-2024Mitigating Translationese with GPT-4: Strategies and PerformanceIn Proceedings of the 25th Annual conference of the European Association for Machine Translation 24–27 june 2024
- TSAR-2023Cross-lingual Mediation: Readability EffectsIn Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2023) 7 september 2023
- SpringerTranslationese and register variation in English-to-Russian professional translation7 september 2021
- EMNLPTranslationese in Russian Literary TextsIn Proceddings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 7 september 2021