Postdoctoral fellowship for Dr. Esra Abdelzaher | Institute of English and American Studies

Under the supervision of Dr. Ágoston Tóth, Esra got her PhD with summa cum laude distinction in 2023. The PhD investigated the intersection between cognitive linguistics and lexicography, and the results of this research were reported in international conferences, Scopus-indexed journals and handbooks of linguistics. Lexicography and Cognitive Linguistics have been studied for decades by the members of the Department of English Linguistics (DEL) at the Institute of English and American Studies; for instance, by the late professor Béla Korponay, department head Béla Hollósy, Péter Pelyvás, Attila Cserép and Ágoston Tóth. Therefore, her PhD research and the planned research with Ágoston Tóth continues decades of scholarly inquiry at DEL. Esra has also been participating in Dr. Ágoston Tóth’s recent research on using neural word embeddings in lexicographic practice. Now, she will join DEL as a post-doctoral researcher for two years to continue her research. Esra’s future research will explore the role of generative language models such as ChatGPT in improving the performance of lexicographic and cognitive semantic tasks. The research will also explore the quantifiable aspects of natural languages and their lexicographic and cognitive implications.

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