Welcome to my Google site! 

I am a cognitive-science linguist with a strong background in mathematics. Below, you will find my bio, research interests, short descriptions of some recent projects, as well as personal facts about me, and a recent selfie. 


I have been scientifically active in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Croatia, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Macedonia, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, and USA.


This Google site is meant as an alternative to https://homepage.univie.ac.at/stela.manova and is still under construction!


A new approach to competition in science: stela.manova@univie.ac.at has been hacked! 

Please contact me at: manova.stela@gmail.com (default address)

manova.stela@proton.me (alternative address)



Bio

I was born in Bulgaria but have carried out research at the University of Vienna for over 20 years. Currently, I lead a few international projects. 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). My research is cross-linguistic and I have worked on: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, English, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Ukrainian. 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


Projects 

I currently work on the relationship between Large Language Models (LLMs) and Linguistic Theory (LT). In LT, at least since Aronoff's (1976) Word Formation in Generative Grammar, it has been claimed that morphemes are not associated with semantics (see also a-morphous morphology, word-based morphology and paradigm-based morphology; likewise recent research in psycholinguistics provides evidence for morphemes that have form but no meaning, e.g. for the human parser, -er in corn-er is a morpheme, although corner is not derived from corn), which is entirely in accord with what is going on in LLMs. The major difference between LLMs and LT consists in the fact that linguists love making things abstract and hierarchical, while in LLMs things are concrete and linear (OK, at an abstract level everything is possible, i.e. all analyses work perfectly :) ; to better understand the LLMs perspective, think of representations, e.g., in terms of a binary code). I also do research on scientific text writing and programming with ChatGPT. For coding experiments, I use Python 3 and tasks from sites such as CodeSignal and LeetCode. Don't hesitate to contact me if you are interested in any of these issues!


A related 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. The paper ChatGPT, n-grams and the power of subword units: The future of research in morphology tackles the question of how humans and machines process language and can be accessed here.


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. The most recent output, the book Diminutives across Languages, Theoretical Frameworks and Linguistic Domains (De Gruyter Mouton, Dec. 2023), can be read online 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. 


Personal facts about me

I know a lot about perfumes and have a huge collection. My favorite perfumers are (in alphabetical order): 1 and 2. I am a fan of the fashion's enfant terrible, more here. I love wearing hats and sunglasses. Here is a recent selfie of me! 😎