Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

About me

I am a linguist, specializing in discourse analysis. My research primarily concentrates on topics in discourse structure of texts, such as discourse relations (relations between propositions or speech acts) and discourse signals (e.g., discourse connective if for Condition relations). Presently, I work as a postdoc (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) in the Department English and American Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. I completed my PhD degree in Linguistics in 2014 at Simon Fraser University (SFU). My PhD dissertation focused on how discourse relations are indicated by a wide variety of signals (such as lexical, semantic, syntactic and genre features, in addition to discourse connectives). The outcome of the project was a corpus of discourse signals, called the RST Signalling Corpus. In the past, I worked in areas such as sentiment analysis, discourse parsing and lexicography (bilingual and multilingual dictionaries). More recently, I have worked on developing NLP resources such as lexicons of discourse connectives in English and Bangla (an Indo-Aryan language). Presently, I and my colleague Dr. Markus Egg are investigating the role of continuity or discontinuity (along dimensions like time, space, action, modality or speech act) in the interpretation discourse relations.

Research interests

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: explicit and implicit discourse relations, signalling in discourse, continuity in discourse, discourse parsing, sentiment analysis

CORPUS LINGUISTICS: corpus annotation, corpus development

LEXICOGRAPHY: discourse connective lexicons, bilingual dictionaries, translation of technical terms

Theoretical Frameworks

Rhetorical Structure Theory, PDTB framework, Appraisal Theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics

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