CLARIN Ambassadors Programme

The aim of the CLARIN Ambassadors Programme is to raise awareness about and encourage participation in CLARIN ERIC in disciplines and communities that are not yet fully integrated in CLARIN.

Ambassadors are appointed with a two-year mandate to actively promote CLARIN by:

Seeking opportunities to promote CLARIN within relevant projects, scholarly networks, institutions, and research infrastructures
Attending key events in their field to actively promote CLARIN with keynote talks, panel discussions, masterclasses etc.
Generating visibility for their activities through CLARIN's newsletter, website and other promotional formats, such as interviews, blog posts, and brochures.

CLARIN Ambassadors

Cristina Vertan – CLARIN Ambassador 01/10/2023-30/09/2025

Cristina Vertan is Senior Research Data Engineer at the Herder Institute for Eastern European History in Marburg a.d. Lahn (Germany), working currently on data discovery and data modelling. In her research she is using a mixed methods approach combining methods from traditional humanities (hermeneutics) and computer science (knowledge representation, natural language processing). A particular focus of her research is on less resourced languages (historical languages with non-Latin script as well as languages from Eastern Europe). She is a former Humboldt Fellow (University of Hamburg, 2002-2003) and holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Bucharest (2000) and a Master in Statistics from the Free University in Brussels (1994). Before joining the Herder Institute, she worked at the University of Hamburg (Department of Natural Language Processing) for more than 20 years, being one of the co-founders of the research group 'Computerphilology' (2002-2020). Between 2020 and 2023, she was member of the DH-Group at the Berlin Academy of Science. Between 2017 and 2021, she was leading the HerCoRe – Hermeneutics and Computer-based approach of Reliability Consistency and Vagueness in historical documents, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and dealing with the challenging topic of representation and interpretation of vague and uncertain information in DH-projects. She was principal investigator in several projects dealing with historical languages: TraCeS (historical Ethiopic, 2014-2018), Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (Egyptian 2021-2023), Teuchos (2007-2010, classical Greek), Text database and dictionary of classical Maya (ongoing since 2018). She is author of GeTa, a multilevel annotation tool for classical Ethiopic as well as ALMAH, the first annotation tool for classical Maya. In projects like Language Technology for eLearning, or ATLAS-Applied Technology for language-aided CMS, the focus of her research was on multilingual applications involving East-European languages. Cristina Vertan was co-organiser of a series of workshops dedicated to natural language processing and digital humanities in the Eastern Europe. One result of the her activities in this area is the book Multilingual Processing in Eastern and Southern EU Languages: Low-Resourced Technologies and Translation. See her personal web page.

Johanna Berg CLARIN Ambassador 01/09/2022-31/08/2024

Johanna Berg works on digital development at the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden. She has been working on digital issues connected to cultural heritage since around 2007 and has held positions within the field at, among others, the National Archives and the National Heritage Board. During the 2010s she was based at Digisam, a governmental initiative to support digital development in the heritage/GLAM sector. She played a central role in the collaborative work that resulted in the Guiding principles for working with digital cultural heritage (2015). When the Swedish Clarin network formed she was the Digisam/National Archives representative in the group, and she held that post the first couple of years. She co-authored the Swe-Clarin Handbok with Leif-Jöran Olsson at Språkbanken Text. She took active part in the speech project Tilltal, in collaboration with the Institute for Language and Folklore (Isof) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden (2017-2020), and has also been on the panel for cultural infrastructure at Swedish research funder Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2020-2022). She is a longtime advocate for open knowledge and public access to cultural heritage collections, and since 2020 on the board of the Swedish Wikimedia chapter.

Eva Soroli CLARIN Ambassador 01/09/2021-31/08/2024

Eva Soroli is Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics at the University of Lille (France), Lead of the Language Re-appropriation team of the CNRS (National Centre of Scientific Research) STL lab. She is member of the National Committee on Language Sciences (Section 34),of the Interdisciplinary Commission Science and Data (CID 55) of the CNRS, and member of the CLARIN Knowledge Centre CORLI of the French Infrastructure for Digital Humanities Huma-Num. Trained in linguistics, cognitive science and psycholinguistics, she was awarded her MSc at the University of Paris-Sud Saclay, and her PhD at the University of Paris 8. She is interested in the relationship between language and thought in typical and atypical populations (main research areas: cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and neurolinguistics). Her current projects involve experimental and corpus investigations from a cross-linguistic perspective combining offline and online data (e.g., oral elicited corpora, non-verbal data, eye tracking, reaction times) on several research domains: bilingualism, L1/L2 acquisition, language assessment, aphasia speech, language and cognitive processing.

For more information, watch the video interview with Eva Soroli or read the Behind the Scenes interview.

Paul Rayson CLARIN Ambassador 01/09/2021-31/08/2024

Paul Rayson is a Professor of Natural Language Processing at Lancaster University, UK and Director of the UCREL interdisciplinary research centre which carries out research in corpus linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). A long-term focus of his work is semantic multilingual NLP in extreme circumstances where language is noisy e.g. in historical, learner, speech, email, txt and other CMC varieties. Along with domain experts, he has applied his research in the areas of dementia detection, mental health, online child protection, cyber security, learner dictionaries, and text mining of biomedical literature, historical corpora, and financial narratives. He was a co-investigator of the five-year ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), which is designed to bring the corpus approach to bear on a range of social sciences. He is also a member of the multidisciplinary Institute Security Lancaster, the Lancaster Digital Humanities Hub, and the Data Science Institute.

Watch the interview with Paul Rayson.

Satu Saalasti CLARIN Ambassador 01/09/2021-31/08/2024

Satu Saalasti is an Assistant professor of Speech and Language Pathology at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interest is in the multimodality of communication especially in clinical populations. Her previous studies include multisensory speech perception and comprehension of instructions in individuals with autism. Furthermore, she studied the neural characteristics of listening to, reading, and lip-reading a naturalistic narrative using functional magnetic resonance imaging. She is also a steering group member of DELAD - initiative, which is promoting sharing disordered speech data among researchers.

Past CLARIN Ambassadors

Francesca Frontini CLARIN Ambassador 2019-2021

Dr Francesca Frontini obtained her PhD from the University of Pavia with a thesis on corpus linguistics. She then joined the Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa as a post-doctoral researcher and worked on several European projects with a focus on computational lexicography and natural language processing. After a four year parenthesis as an associate professor at the Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, she recently returned to ILC as a permanent researcher. Her research interests lie at the crossroads of natural language processing and digital humanities. She is particularly interested in named entity annotation for digital editions, as well as digital methods for the analysis of literary texts and literary criticism. Together with Carmen Brando she developed REDEN, a tool for named entity linking. She is a member of the steering committee of the ADHO Special Interest Group for Digital Literary Stylistics as well as the Nénufar project which aims to digitise and publish a diachronic corpus of historical editions of the French Dictionary Petit Larousse Illustré.

Maciej Maryl CLARIN Ambassador 2019-2021

Dr Maciej Maryl is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN); founding Director of the Digital Humanities Centre at IBL PAN. He is a member of Teksty Drugie and OpenMethods Editorial Boards and represents IBL PAN at DARIAH-PL Steering Board and OPERAS Core Group. He co-chairs DARIAH Digital Methods and Practices Observatory and is a member of ALLEA E-humanities Working Group. In 2013 he defended his PhD thesis dedicated to the literary life online. His research interests cover literary communication, multimedia writing, digital editorship, digital humanities and the relationship between technology and culture. He currently chairs a COST action New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent (NEP4DISSENT) and leads IBL PAN research team in the H2020 project Shaping interdisciplinary practices in Europe (SHAPE-ID). In cooperation with CLARIN-PL he contributes to the development of Literary Exploration Machine (LEM), a web-based, language-processing tool for SSH scholars working with texts in Polish.

Toine Pieters CLARIN Ambassador 2019-2021

Prof. Toine Pieters is Head of the Freudenthal Institute and Senior Fellow of the Descartes Institute of the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University. He has been project leader and research coordinator of multiple projects in the digital humanities field (WAHSP [CLARIN], BILAND [CLARIN], Translantis [NWO], Asymenc [HERA], Dream [NWO] and Time Capsule [NWO]). The latter project aimed at connecting and integrating disparate data sources through linked data approaches to re-contextualise lost historical and cultural contexts. He is currently project leader of Utrecht Time Machine and represents Utrecht University in the European Time Machine consortium. This project aims at using space and time as shared references across domains, disciplines and cultures within the dynamic context of urban geographies.

Michal Mochtak – CLARIN Ambassador 01/10/2023-31/01/2024

Michal Mochtak is an Excellence Fellow at the Department of Political Science at Radboud University, working on projects bridging traditional political science topics with the latest advancements in computational linguistics. In his research, he focuses on the existing challenges to democracy, election-related conflicts, political violence, and modern forms of authoritarian rule. He is a former Fulbright Scholar (Yale University, 2017), Cvachovec Fellow (Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto 2017), and a recipient of the Jan Hus Foundation Scholarship (2015) and Radboud Excellence Fellowship (2022). Before joining Radboud University, he worked as a researcher on the ERC-funded project ELWar – Electoral Legacies of War: Political Competition in Postwar Southeast Europe (2017-2022), where he studied war legacies in the discourse of political elites in postwar societies. His main focus was on designing new strategies for mapping political discourse in low-resourced languages and developing domain-specific tools for processing hundreds of thousands of speeches collected from postwar parliaments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. The main outcome of this effort is an upcoming book War Narratives in Post-conflict Societies: Keeping the Past Alive in the Former Yugoslavia (Routledge, 2024). His current research focuses on the transnational dimension of authoritarianism and the development of new strategies for measuring latent political concepts. The project utilizes advanced computational methods, especially natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and statistical modeling, to test the hypothesis that authoritarianism spreads transnationally. The first results indicate that this indeed happens, so the next step is understanding how. See his personal website.

If you have any questions regarding the CLARIN Ambassadors Programme, please email us at ambassadors [at] clarin.eu (ambassadors[at]clarin[dot]eu)