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Stela Manova's Homepage

About me

I am a cognitive-science linguist with a strong background in mathematics. My PhD degree is in General Linguistics (with a minor in Slavic Linguistics) and I obtained it from the University of Vienna where I also did my postdoc and senior postdoc in Slavic Studies (linguistic orientation). 

​I investigate the structure and meaning of words, phrases and sentences from a theoretical, typological and cognitive perspective.​ My work is cross-linguistic and I have carried out research on: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, English, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Ukrainian.

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My projects have been supported by: Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Austrian National Bank (OeNB), Erste Bank (Die Erste) - Vienna, Mayor of Vienna, University of Vienna, European Science Foundation (ESF), SNS Pisa (Italy), Consejería de Educación y Ciencia, Junta de Andalucía (Spain), and private sponsors.
Research interests
  • Language and cognition
  • Theoretical linguistics / Language modelling / NLP
  • Experimental linguistics / Psycholinguistics / (Foreign) language learning
  • Computational linguistics
  • Corpus linguistics
  • Statistics 
  • Algorithms and data structures
  • Complexity measuring of linguistic analyses
  • Programming languages (Java, Python, C++, C, JavaScript, HTML, R, among others)

Current research 

I lead a few international projects. You can learn more about my research activities here. 

My most recent project is Language Modeling with N-Grams: The End-to-end N-Gram Model (EteNGraM). This paper introduces EteNGraM, a toy model for NLP. EteNGraM operates only with bigrams and trigrams but appears more efficient than current syntactic models. If you are a linguist, you should try writing texts with n-grams, i.e. based solely on the frequency of occurrence of sequences of word forms, e.g. with the multilingual Google Books Ngram Viewer.

Since 2020, I have also been the main organizer of a series of workshops titled Dissecting Morphological Theory: Diminutivization. The workshops are held in conjunction with different international conferences. You can access the workshop-series website here. 

Besides linguistics, I love math and coding. My favorite mathematician is Carl Friedrich Gauss and I have referred to his ideas for solving problems in morphology and syntax, see these papers: 1, 2, 3. I am also interested in algorithms, data structures, programming languages and complexity measuring, specifically in how to adapt the Big O notation for measuring the complexity of linguistic analyses carried out within different frameworks, i.e. I believe that complexity in both computer science and linguistics is not a property of data but of analysis, and CF Gauss's work is, actually, the best illustration of this claim, see this presentation.

I have profiles on: Research Gate, Google Scholar  and Academia.
​Contact
Middle European Interdisciplinary Master Program in Cognitive Science
University of Vienna
Department of Philosophy
Universitätsstraße 7
1010 Vienna
Austria
Email: stela.manova@univie.ac.at
Web: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/stela.manova
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News

Recent and upcoming events 
  • Invited speaker, Princeton Phonology Forum (PɸF) 2022, Princeton University, NJ, USA, 2-3 December 2022. The recording of my talk The wheres and whens of  affixation: theoretical, computational, and experimental evidence can be accessed here. Abstracts and recordings of all PɸF 2022 talks here. 
  • Modeling language data and evaluating linguistic analyses with mathematical methods: Implications for construction grammar, talk at ICLC16, Düsseldorf, Germany, 7-11 August 2023. I am presenting in the general session, 
  • Recruited talk, workshop in honor of Morris Halle, SLE 2023, Athens, Greece, 29 Aug-1 Sept 2023. Abstract here. 
  • Invited speaker, DeriMo 2023: Resources and Tools for Derivational Morphology, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 5-6 October 2023. The CFP is open until June 12, 2023. 

May 2023
Accepted for publication: Slavic diminutive morphology: An interplay of scope, templates and paradigms, co-authored with D. Sitchinava. 

April 2023 
Accepted for publication: 
The iconicity of affix order. In The Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language, edited by Fischer, Olga, Kimi Akita & Pamela Perniss. New York: Oxford University Press, also  lingbuzz/007270.
 
March 2023

In press: S. Manova, L. Grestenberger & K. Korecky-Kröll (eds.), Diminutives across languages, theoretical frameworks and linguistic domains. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 380, De Gruyter Mouton.

February 2023
Scientific committee Annual International Conference of the Institute for Bulgarian Language 2023, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria. 

January 2023
In press: 
Ordering restrictions between affixes.  In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology, edited by Ackema, Peter, Sabrina Bendjaballah, Eulàlia Bonet, and Antonio Fábregas. John Wiley & Sons. Also available on lingbuzz/006219. 

December 2023 
Walking on the porch of Einstein's home at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, NJ, USA, and thinking of affixation :) Einstein on the porch!

November 2022
MEi:CogSci talk: Natural Language Processing Without Grammar.

October 2022
Invitation to THE's 2023 Global Academic Reputation Survey. "The survey is strictly invitation-only; Universities cannot make nominations or supply contact lists, and individuals cannot nominate themselves for participation. Therefore, your participation, together with those of other highly regarded academics, will help us to generate a comprehensive view of global higher education and THE's relevant rankings."

June 2022
My advisee, Kimberly Brosche, presented her project German Word  Formation and the Organization of the Mental Lexicon
at the International MEi:CogSci conference in Zagreb, Croatia, 23-25 June 2022. This is her poster, the publication in the conference proceedings can be accessed here. 
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