Chadi Ben Youssef

Chadi Ben Youssef is a postdoctoral researcher at the English Institute, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he also served as a lecturer in French and Italian and a teaching assistant in Linguistics. His research focuses on computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics, with emphasis on Multi-Word Expressions and low-resource language analysis. Currently, he works in Dr. Martin Hilpert’s lab, advancing Diachronic Construction Grammar.

Education

• Bachelor’s in English Philology (Université Paris 8)
• Master’s in Linguistics (Université Paris 8)
• PhD in Linguistics (UCSB, supervised by Dr. Stefan Th. Gries)

Research Interests
Chadi investigates sociocultural and structural language questions using computational methods. Key areas include MWE discovery algorithms (e.g., mMERGE), code-switching in Tunisian Arabic, and intersections of gender/race/sexuality in phonetic variation (e.g., /s/ production).

Teaching

• Lecturer: French/Italian courses at UCSB (2016)
• Teaching Assistant/Associate: 13+ undergraduate Linguistics courses at UCSB
• Instructor of record: Programming for Linguists, Computational Linguistics, Language, Race, and Ethnicity

Labs & Projects
Current postdoc project: Detecting connectivity changes in Diachronic Construction Grammar frameworks. Collaborations include work on radical-right media discourse analysis and bilingual language acquisition.