32.3021, Rising Stars: Meet Asya Yurchenko!

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3021. Fri Sep 24 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3021, Rising Stars: Meet Asya Yurchenko!

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Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2021 09:15:54
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Rising Stars: Meet Asya Yurchenko!

 
Dear Linguist List Readers,

For the first rising star of 2021 we have Asya Yurchenko, an MA student making
her meteoric rise at Technische Universität Dresden. She has run and
participated in a number of interesting experiments. These include creating a
corpus of English in Indian newspapers (along with the web crawler necessary
to attain the data) and working on a project on English in Madeira in
cooperation with linguists from TU Dresden and TU Dortmund. She's been
involved in not just one but two joint publications accepted by high-profile
journals in corpus linguistics and English linguistics. This is only a sliver
of what Asya has accomplished and we expect to see great things from her in
the future. For now, let's get to her piece!

******************************************************************

One of the biggest strengths of linguistics, for me, is its multidisciplinary
nature. Because of how central language is to the human experience, its
connection to practically all areas of our lives cannot be understated. This
makes cooperation between linguistics and other fields such as psychology,
anthropology, neurobiology, law, social and forensic sciences as well as
computer science a logical endeavor. In the future, I foresee these
multidisciplinary ties becoming even stronger, with linguists being able to
contribute even more to different fields where our expertise might be
required. For instance, although the discipline of forensic linguistics is
already thriving, with experts in the field constantly contributing important
findings to the existing body of knowledge, I expect to see forensic linguists
and other forensic experts working together more closely in the future on a
variety of language-related elements of crime. Furthermore, I foresee
linguists entering and contributing more to those areas of research which, at
the moment, are still mainly considered to be the domain of computer science,
such as Natural Language Processing, AI, human-machine interaction, etc.

Two areas from the sphere of computer science that I would like to see more
linguists participate in are fake news detection and automatic text
summarization. With the ongoing pandemic and the countless misinformation
campaigns which have been disseminated since its outset, as well as with the
rise of populist, social media-savvy politicians and insidious conspiracy
theories, the need for effective fake news identification and labelling has
never been greater. In my opinion, fake news detection is an incredibly
important area of research on which linguists, computer scientists, forensic
experts and psychologists alike can collaborate (hello again,
multidisciplinarity!).

Automatic text summarization (ATS), to me, is another area of great relevance.
With the enormous, ever-increasing volume of information we are confronted
with every day, most of which we simply do not have the time to process, ATS
has the task of making it significantly easier to handle. While the complex
cognitive process of how humans summarize information is a fascinating subject
of study in itself, a question ATS asks is how can we get a computer algorithm
to approximate it in order to produce concise, meaningful summaries?
Furthermore, with huge advancements having been made over the past decades on
automatic summaries of news articles and scientific papers, ATS researchers
are now turning their attention to other text genres, such as books,
screenplays, opinion pieces, Twitter threads, as well as tasks like
multi-document and user-guided summarizations. Such a wide variety of text
types, approaches and methods makes this an incredible field for
experimentation and (again!) collaboration for experts from different fields,
most importantly linguistics and computer science. It is also something I can
see myself contributing my unique perspective to in the future.

However the future of linguistics may look, I am sure that it will continue to
be filled with innovation, experimentation and creativity, which are some of
the qualities I cherish the most about the field. I will forever be grateful
to my advisor and mentor Prof. Dr. Claudia Lange for fostering these qualities
in her students by encouraging us to always think outside the box and come up
with research ideas which are bold, original and exciting. And, most
importantly, to have fun with our research! Without her encouragement, I do
not see myself having ever attempted to quantify estrangement in the language
of Futurama for ICAME or having created a verbal lie detection method for my
master’s thesis using the British comedy show Would I Lie to You? as my
research database. It is this opportunity to be creative and come up with
unique ways of doing research that, for me, makes linguistics one of the most
innovative sciences. As a research associate and PhD student-to-be, I look
forward to fostering boundless experimentation and creativity in my own future
students and imparting on them the value of unique ideas.

******************************************************************

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3021	
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