About me

I am a linguist, specializing in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and lexicography. I completed my PhD degree in linguistics in 2014 at Simon Fraser University, Canada (SFU). I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Germany at the University of Potsdam (Uni Potsdam) and thereafter at Humboldt University of Berlin (HU Berlin). Presently, I am working as a university lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland (ÅAU).  

My research primarily concentrates on topics in discourse and pragmatics, such as discourse relations (i.e., relations between propositions or speech acts) and discourse signals (e.g., discourse connective if for Condition relations). In my PhD dissertation, I investigated 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). Furthermore, I contributed to compiling both encyclopaedic and discipline-specific bilingual dictionaries (English-Bangla). More recently, I have worked on developing NLP resources such as lexicons of discourse connectives in English and Bangla. 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, annotation evaluation

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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