Maria Kunilovskaya

University of Saarland

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

Apr 7, 2025	Back to regular teaching! This semester (SoSe-2025), I volunteered to offer a research seminar `Quality in Human and Machine Translation` (QH&MT) at the Language Science and Technology Department, University of Saarland. The seminar looks into the properties of MT, especially with regard to how it compares to human translation. It is designed to bring together the linguistic expertise on, and the technological aspects/issues of measuring, quality. We will look into (i) the theoretical pre-requisites of translation quality, (ii) compare approaches applied to humans and machines, and (iii) overview the best practices in manual as well as automatic quality annotation. The proposed research topics include linguistic studies based on comparative-contrastive analysis, developing TQ test sets, investigating existing metrics and designing new methods, tweaking MT and MT quality models to capture specific errors or address specified aspects of production. I invite computationally-minded linguists and NLP students who are curious whether today’s technology is a real competition to human translators, and what nuances there are to this comparison. We start next Monday, 14 April 2025, at 16.15 (Gebäude C7 2 - Seminarraum -1.05).
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.

selected publications

NoDaLiDa-2025

Predictability of Microsyntactic Units across Slavic Languages: A translation-based Study

Kunilovskaya, Maria, Zaitova, Iuliia, Xue, Wei, Stenger, Irina, and Avgustinova, Tania

In The Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies 2025
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

In The Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies 2024

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

Bib

@inproceedings{Kunilovskaya2024prompting,
  abbr = {EAMT-2024},
  author = {Kunilovskaya, Maria and Chowdhury, Koel Dutta and Przybyl, Heike and {Espa{\~{n}}a i Bonet}, Cristina and {Van Genabith}, Josef},
  title = {{Mitigating Translationese with GPT-4: Strategies and Performance}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th Annual conference of the European Association for Machine Translation},
  month = {24--27 June},
  pages = {411--430},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  address = {Sheffield, UK},
  year = {2024},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true}
}

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

Bib

@inproceedings{Kunilovskaya2023readability,
  abbr = {TSAR-2023},
  author = {Kunilovskaya, Maria and Mitkov, Ruslan and Wandl-Vogt, Eveline},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2023)},
  editor = {},
  month = {7 September},
  pages = {33--43},
  location = {Varna, Bulgaria},
  publisher = {INCOMA Ltd.},
  title = {{Cross-lingual Mediation: Readability Effects}},
  year = {2023},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  url = {}
}

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

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{Kunilovskaya2023parallel,
  abbr = {RANLP},
  author = {Kunilovskaya, Maria and Przybyl, Heike and Teich, Elke and Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing},
  editor = {},
  location = {Varna, Bulgaria},
  pages = {608--618},
  publisher = {INCOMA Ltd.},
  title = {{Simultaneous Interpreting as a Noisy Channel: How Much Information Gets Through}},
  year = {2023},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  html = {https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-092-2_066}
}

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

Bib HTML

@article{Alyukov2023warmm,
  abbr = {EACL},
  author = {Alyukov, Maxim and Kunilovskaya, Maria and Semenov, Andrei},
  title = {{Wartime Media Monitor (WarMM-2022): A Study of Information Manipulation on Russian Social Media during the Russia-Ukraine War}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature},
  pages = {152--161},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2023},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  html = {https://aclanthology.org/2023.latechclfl-1.17}
}

PhD

Translationese indicators for human translation quality estimation (based on English-to-Russian translation of mass-media texts)

Kunilovskaya, Maria

7 september 2023

Bib HTML

@phdthesis{Kunilovskaya2023phd,
  abbr = {PhD},
  author = {Kunilovskaya, Maria},
  title = {{Translationese indicators for human translation quality estimation (based on English-to-Russian translation of mass-media texts)}},
  year = {2023},
  school = {University of Wolverhampton},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  html = {https://wlv.openrepository.com/handle/2436/625250}
}

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

Bib HTML

@article{Kunilovskaya2021triggers,
  abbr = {Target},
  author = {Kunilovskaya, Maria and Ilyushchenya, Tatyana and Morgoun, Natalia and Mitkov, Ruslan},
  journal = {Target},
  title = {{Source language difficulties in learner translation: Evidence from an error-annotated corpus}},
  year = {2022},
  selected = {true},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  html = {https://doi.org/10.1075/target.20189.kun}
}

Springer

Translationese and register variation in English-to-Russian professional translation

Kunilovskaya, Maria, and Corpas Pastor, Gloria

7 september 2021

Bib

@article{Kunilovskaya2021regs,
  abbr = {Springer},
  author = {Kunilovskaya, Maria and Corpas Pastor, Gloria},
  booktitle = {New Frontiers in Translation Studies},
  doi = {10.1007/978-981-16-4918-9_6},
  url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355203667_Translationese_and_Register_Variation_in_English-To-Russian_Professional_Translation},
  editor = {Wang, Vincent X. and Li, Defeng and Lim, Lily},
  isbn = {978-981-16-4917-2},
  issn = {21978697},
  pages = {133--180},
  publisher = {Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd},
  title = {{Translationese and register variation in English-to-Russian professional translation}},
  year = {2021},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  selected = {true}
}

Springer LNCS

Multilingual Embeddings for Clustering Cultural Events

Kunilovskaya, Maria, and Kuzmenko, Elizaveta

In Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts 7 september 2021

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{Kunilovskaya2021cult,
  abbr = {Springer LNCS},
  author = {Kunilovskaya, Maria and Kuzmenko, Elizaveta},
  booktitle = {Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts},
  pages = {1--10},
  publisher = {Springer LNCS},
  title = {{Multilingual Embeddings for Clustering Cultural Events}},
  volume = {13217},
  year = {2021},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  selected = {true},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2023.latechclfl-1.17},
  html = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.latechclfl-1.12.pdf}
}

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

Bib

@inproceedings{Kunilovskaya2021lit,
  abbr = {EMNLP},
  author = {Kunilovskaya, Maria and Lapshinova-koltunski, Ekaterina and Mitkov, Ruslan},
  booktitle = {Proceddings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature},
  title = {{Translationese in Russian Literary Texts}},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2021.latechclfl-1.12},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.latechclfl-1.12.pdf},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  year = {2021},
  selected = {true}
}