Nursulu Sagimbayeva
Universität des Saarlandes
Saarbrücken, Germany
I am a M.Sc. student in Language Science and Technology at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. I'm excited about Explainable AI, Mechanistic Interpretability, Brain-AI Alignment, Health/MedTech, and startups 🚀
At the moment, I am looking forward to pursuing a Ph.D. or a research engineering position related to these fields.
During my Master's, I got the chance to explore both industry and research work. As a working student at MPIRIQ, I contributed to clinical NLP applications and developed evaluation pipelines. Prior to that, I interned at the Group Investment Management department at Munich RE, where I had an opportunity to propose and implement the first AI project in the department. Before that, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Societal Computing (I2SC) led by Prof. Dr. Ingmar Weber; we created a benchmark on detecting inconsistencies in political texts. In parallel to these experiences, I've been working on a project on brain-LLM alignment, which I ended up pursuing as my Master's thesis supervised by Dr. Mariya Toneva and Prof. Dr. Michael Hahn.
May, 2026: Gave a talk on studying the influence of user politeness on AI Assistant behavior at StUTS-79 in Berlin, Germany.
November, 2025: Gave a talk on using Mechanistic Interpretability to study Brain-AI Alignment at StUTS-78 in Stuttgart, Germany.
August, 2025: Presented our poster on Encoding Brain Regions with Sentiment-Relevant Circuits in LLMs at CCN-2025.
June, 2025: Presented our paper on Inconsistency detection at ICWSM MisD workshop.
May, 2025: Started a working student position at MPIRIQ as a clinical NLP research engineer.
Nov,2024 - May,2025: Did an internship at the Group Investment Management department at Munich RE.
17-19 Nov, 2023: Participated with an idea at Techstars StartUp Weekend organized by Thriatlon in Saarbrücken.
06.10.2023: Our team received the Best paper award in the NetMob challenge 2023!
Oct 2023: Became a holder of Deutschlandstipendium 2023-2024.
7-8 Sept, 2023: Presenting a poster at the Opening of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Societal Computing.
30.06.2023: Gave a talk about my project on topic modeling in songs at TaCoS 2023 student conference at the University of Dusseldorf.
07.06.2023: Presented my essay on on a Kazakh slur and hypotheses on slur reclamations at STAL-2023 conference at Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.
31.05.2023: Started working as a Research Assistant at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Societal Computing under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ingmar Weber.
01.10.2022: Started my studies at Saarland University in the M.Sc. program in Language Science and Technology!
Poster at Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (2025). Nursulu Sagimbayeva, Dota Tianai Dong
In proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Misinformation Detection in the Era of LLMs (MisD). Nursulu Sagimbayeva, Ruveyda Betül Bahçeci, Ingmar Weber
Winner of the best paper in the NetMob challenge 2023. Till Koebe, Zinnya del Villar, Brahmani Nutakki, Nursulu Sagimbayeva, Ingmar Weber
Karolina Kuligowska, Agnieszka Repka, Nursulu Sagimbayeva, Text Mining in overcoming disinformation: human cognitive security, [in:] Paulina Szymczyk, Joanna Kozłowska (eds.), Education and society - an interdisciplinary analysis of selected issues, Scientific Publisher TYGIEL, Poland - Lublin 2022 (ISBN: 978-83-67104-44-9)
Current GPA: 1.4/4.0 (best: 1.0)
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
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
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)
A study on the influence of user politeness VS rudeness on AI Assistant behavior.
Song topic exploration across countries with NLP and visual analytics.
Literary analysis project identifying character traits with NLP.
Interactive support chatbot designed for aphasia patients.
A cognitive alignment study comparing brain signals and LLM attention.
Group recommendation app that helps friends decide together.
A BCI-driven kitchen navigation prototype powered by EEG signals.
Interview with Vera Demberg on Surprisal theory, discourse, and NLP trends
Interview with Iona Gessinger on human-computer interaction, forensic phonetics, and career path
Interview with Maciej Tarnowski
Interview with Badr Abdullah on speech processing