Maria Kunilovskaya

linguistics, contrastive and computational

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University of Saarland

SFB B7 project

Saarbrücken, Germany

Postdoc Researcher

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
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

  1. UM Press
    Confuse and Normalise: Authoritarian Propaganda in a High-Choice Media Environment during Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
    Alyukov, Maxim,  Kunilovskaya, Maria, and Semenov, Andrei
    2024
  2. EAMT-2024
    Mitigating Translationese with GPT-4: Strategies and Performance
    Kunilovskaya, Maria, Chowdhury, Koel Dutta, Przybyl, Heike, España i Bonet, Cristina, and Van Genabith, Josef
    In Proceedings of the 25th Annual conference of the European Association for Machine Translation 24–27 june 2024
  3. TSAR-2023
    Cross-lingual Mediation: Readability Effects
    Kunilovskaya, Maria, Mitkov, Ruslan, and Wandl-Vogt, Eveline
    In Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2023) 7 september 2023
  4. RANLP
    Simultaneous Interpreting as a Noisy Channel: How Much Information Gets Through
    Kunilovskaya, Maria, Przybyl, Heike, Teich, Elke, and Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina
    In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing 7 september 2023
  5. EACL
    Wartime Media Monitor (WarMM-2022): A Study of Information Manipulation on Russian Social Media during the Russia-Ukraine War
    Alyukov, Maxim,  Kunilovskaya, Maria, and Semenov, Andrei
    7 september 2023
  6. PhD
    Translationese indicators for human translation quality estimation (based on English-to-Russian translation of mass-media texts)
    Kunilovskaya, Maria
    7 september 2023
  7. Target
    Source language difficulties in learner translation: Evidence from an error-annotated corpus
    Kunilovskaya, Maria, Ilyushchenya, Tatyana, Morgoun, Natalia, and Mitkov, Ruslan
    Target 7 september 2022
  8. Springer
    Translationese and register variation in English-to-Russian professional translation
    Kunilovskaya, Maria, and Corpas Pastor, Gloria
    7 september 2021
  9. Springer LNCS
    Multilingual Embeddings for Clustering Cultural Events
    Kunilovskaya, Maria, and Kuzmenko, Elizaveta
    In Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts 7 september 2021
  10. EMNLP
    Translationese in Russian Literary Texts
    Kunilovskaya, Maria, Lapshinova-koltunski, Ekaterina, and Mitkov, Ruslan
    In Proceddings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 7 september 2021