Dr. Anastassia Shaitarova
I am a computational linguist with an MA and a PhD from the Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, my dear alma mater. Before pivoting my career toward technology and research, I worked in the San Francisco Bay Area as a healthcare interpreter in hospitals and clinics, and as a consultant and interpreter for American families adopting from Russia and Ukraine. I am multilingual and multicultural, with a diverse set of skills and interests, which I strive to put into practice in service of my community.
I have always wanted to be an explorer, and my PhD project led me into a new, barely-defined research direction that is now rapidly gaining traction: How does Generative AI affect the way we express ourselves linguistically? With no established research paradigm, I explored across multiple linguistics-adjacent disciplines to measure the impact of generative AI on natural language. My thesis, Generated Text as a Locus of Language Contact: Exploring the Impact of Generative AI on English and German, integrates insights and methods from corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, communication studies, and translation studies.
Since then, I have continued to work at the intersection of language, data, and technology. My postdoctoral research combines historical linguistics, multilingual text analysis, and large-scale NLP, from indexing 12,000 multilingual letters in the 16th century to developing open-source Python tools for eye-tracking research. Across projects, I bring together rigorous linguistic analysis, computational modeling, and collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to tackle complex questions about language in context.
Currently, I am working as a PostDoc in the OpenEye Project within the Department of Digital Linguistics, University of Zurich.