University of Helsinki
Hello there! I’m Elaine, a new postdoctoral researcher in the HelsinkiNLP Research Group. To start off, I have not always worked in NLP. I worked in the financial technology sector before I decided to study for a master’s degree. I obtained my MSc in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki where my concentration was on algorithmic bioinformatics. After that, I was a research assistant in computational genomics at the Technical University of Munich. Then in late 2018, I started my doctoral research at the University of Helsinki, in the Discovery Research Group led by Prof. Hannu Toivonen.
During my PhD, I worked on two EU Horizon 2020 projects: NewsEye (https://www.newseye.eu/) and EMBEDDIA (http://embeddia.eu/). Both these projects involved building tools to help analyse large-scale news collections. In the former, we focused on historical news collections from Finland, France, and Austria, and in the latter, on news media from less-represented European languages such as Finnish, Estonian, and Croatian. I worked on various tasks in the projects and helped develop new methods in topic modeling, lexical semantic change, news headline generation, and multilingual news matching. Methodological innovations aside, these projects exposed me to the inherently interdisciplinary nature of NLP and language technology and that, I think, is the most exciting thing about this field. I enjoy building tools that could be useful to researchers in the humanities and social sciences, and beyond.
Now I am investigating methods to quantify and model uncertainty in various linguistic tasks. You can also find out more about my work on my homepage, https://ezosa.github.io/!
