“My main research interests are hybrid approaches to natural language processing combining data-driven methods and linguistic knowledge.” Kristina Nilsson Björkenstam, PhD in Computational Linguistics at Stockholm University.

Kristina Nilsson Björkenstam is currently involved in the MINGLE project (“Modelling the emergence of linguistic structures in early childhood”), where the long term goal is to model the emergence of linguistic structures in child language based on distributional information in the utterances directed at the infant within its ecological environment.

She is developing a longitudinal corpus of video and audio recordings of parent-child interaction with verbal and non-verbal annotation (transcription, eye gaze, object-related actions, gestures) and discourse information. Within this project, she has studied the distribution of disfluency in child-directed speech in comparison to adult-directed speech, and synchrony across modalities (that is, recurring patterns or structural regularities that may reduce the complexity of the language learning task, e.g., the parent shaking an object in the infant’s visual field while verbally naming it).

As part of this project, a longitudinal corpus of child-directed speech (LONG-MINGLE) has been made available for research.This corpus consists of 57 transcripts from longitudinal dyads with 13 children between 2 and 33 months of age.

Her previous work includes coreference resolution, named entity recognition, cross-language information retrieval, and computer-assisted language learning. Past corpus construction projects that have resulted in publicly available resources include the Stockholm University Strindberg Corpus, consisting of 7 autobiographical novels by August Strindberg, annotated with part-of-speech, morpho-syntactic information, and lemmas, and SUC-CORE, the gold standard section of The Swedish Treebank annotated with coreference relations between noun phrases.

Related links

• Stockholm University Strindberg Corpus (SUSC)
• SUC-CORE: SUC 2.0 Annotated with NP Coreference