Natalia Levshina, Assistant Professor of Communication and Computational Methods at the Centre for Language Studies, has been appointed member of Academia Europaea. Only invited researchers are eligible to join this institute. A great achievement, in other words!
The Academia Europaea
The Academia Europaea focuses on promoting and disseminating excellence in science across a wide range of disciplines for the common good and supporting education at all levels, worldwide.
Moreover, the Academy is committed to promoting European research, advising governments and international organisations on scientific matters and fostering interdisciplinary and international cooperation. Natalia Levshina is a member of the Linguistics domain. Membership is by invitation only, and is preceded by a peer review selection process.
Natalia Levshina
Natalia Levshina is an assistant professor of communication and computational methods at Radboud University. Her main research interests are linguistic typology, corpora, cognitive and functional linguistics. She also teaches courses on different topics around AI and statistics. After obtaining her PhD at the University of Leuven in 2011, she worked in Jena, Marburg, Louvain-la-Neuve, Leipzig, where she got her habilitation qualification in 2019, and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She has published a book “Communicative Efficiency: Language structure and use” (Cambridge University Press, 2022), in which she formulates the main principles of communicatively efficient linguistic behaviour and shows how these principles can explain why human languages are the way they are. Natalia is also the author of a best-selling statistical manual “How to Do Linguistics with R” (Benjamins, 2015).
Goals and contribution
With her research, Natalia has two main missions. Firstly, it seeks to understand why human languages have developed the way they have, approaching this question from a functional perspective that prioritises communicative efficiency.
Secondly, her research aims to promote the integration and advancement of artificial intelligence and cutting-edge statistical methods within the language sciences. Furthermore, it supports the development of educational programmes on AI, chatbots, artificial neural networks, and related technologies, with particular attention to the opportunities and risks that generative AI presents for both society and the field of linguistics.
As a member of the AE, Natalia will be going to participate in annual conferences and other events for networking and interdisciplinary collaboration. Moreover, she hopes to have an opportunity to support policymaking in Europe.