Diana Sousa Marques Santos

Roles and Affiliations: Diana Sousa Marques Santos is a Professor of Portuguese Linguistics at the University of Oslo (UiO), affiliated with the Institute for European Languages, Literature, and Area Studies (ILOS) within the Faculty of Humanities. Since 2011, she has held positions as Associate Professor (until 2012) and subsequently Full Professor. Her research focuses on computational linguistics, corpus-based studies, and cultural analysis, particularly in the context of Portuguese and Lusophone literature.

Education: She earned a 5-year engineering degree in Electronics and Computers from the Technical University of Lisbon (IST), followed by an MSc in Machine Translation and a PhD in contrastive corpus-based semantics, both from IST.

Research Interests: Diana’s work spans computational processing of Portuguese, natural language processing, semantics, translation, and distant reading. She leads the Linguateca project, fostering computational resources for Portuguese and collaborates internationally with institutions like the University of Southern Denmark. Key projects include PANTERA (parallel corpus for Portuguese-Norwegian translation studies) and contributions to the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC) for distant reading.

Teaching: She teaches Portuguese grammar, linguistics, and cultural studies at undergraduate and graduate levels, including courses like Introduction to Statistical Thinking for PhD students. Her pedagogical efforts include co-authoring textbooks such as Viva! for Portuguese language education.

Projects and Activism: Diana advocates for open-source software in academia, notably opposing the University of Oslo’s shift to Microsoft Exchange. She promotes Lusophone cultural studies and participates in initiatives like the BILLIG project (GIS and NLP in literary geography). Her work bridges computational methods and humanities, emphasizing interdisciplinary approaches.

Labs and Teams: She contributes to research groups such as Digital Humanities, Grammar and Meaning Representations, and the Ibero-American Research Hub (IberoARH), fostering collaborative projects in language technology and cultural analysis.