“There is a lot more to understand than what is literally said”
Interview with Vera Demberg on Surprisal theory, discourse, and NLP trends
Nursulu Sagimbayeva
Universität des Saarlandes
Saarbrücken/
About me
I am a M.Sc. student in Language Science and Technology at the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken.
I'm excited about Explanaible AI, Mechanistic Interpretability, Health/MedTech, and startups 🚀Happy to connect via Gmail or LinkedIn :)
Mini-bio
I spent past half a year doing an internship at the Group Investment Management department at Munich RE, and had an opportunity to propose/implement the first AI project in the department.
Before that, I worked as a Research Assistant in the Interdisciplinary Institute for Societal Computing Group (I2SC) led by Prof. Dr. Ingmar Weber (Alexander von Humboldt Professor for AI).. We created a benchmark on detecting inconsistencies in political texts - for example, between what politicians claim in their manifesto VS what they say on the interviews. You can check the paper out here :)
I obtained my Bachelor's degree in Translation Studies at the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. Towards the end of my third year, I discovered the existence of Computational Linguisitcs. The idea that such a complex entity as Language can be described by numbers and vectors blew my mind. I started studying Python, Statistics, NLP and machine-learning courses myself online, and immediately after graduation, I went to pursue my Master's in Natural Language Processing.
It's been a fun journey ever since, and I am looking forward to working on more interesting projects!
Universität des Saarlandes
M.Sc. in Language Science and Technology
October 2022 - present
Coursework: Computational Linguistics • Statistics with R • Statistical Natural Language Processing • Empirical Methods • Math (Linear Algebra, Calculus) • Python • Neural Networks • Machine Learning • Trustworthy Machine Learning • Ethics for Nerds • Machine Translation
Seminars: What Do Pretrained Language Models Really Understand? • Machine Learning for NLP • Brain-Computer Interfaces • Bridging Language in Machines with Language in the Brain • Efficient and Robust NLP • Interpreting and Analyzing Neural Language Models
Software Projects: Deep Learning for the Processing and Interpretation of Literary Texts • BERT and friends: Pretrained LMs in Natural Language Understanding
Current GPA: 1.5/4.0 (best: 1.0)
University of Warsaw
Exchange student
October 2019 - February 2020;
October 2021 - February 2022
Coursework 4th year: Text Mining and Social Media Mining • Introduction to Pragmatics • Noam Chomsky's Concept of Language • Perspective in Language • Research Methods in Linguistics • Grammar in Text • Polish language course - upper intermediate level B2
Coursework 2nd year: Analytic Philosophy • Cognitive Linguistics • Introduction to Economics • Introduction to Sociolinguistics • Language and international relations. Linguistic support for interdisciplinary research • Transnational Corporations • Does it pay to invest in human capital? Theory and empirical evidence
Al-Farabi Kazakh National University
B.A. in Translation Studies
2018 - 2022
GPA: 3.75/4.0 (best: 4.0)
Thesis topic: exploring how peculiarities of user-generated content in the Kazakh language affect the subjective quality of machine translation in Kazakh-Russian language pair (grade 98/100)
