معرفی
Dr. Merel Scholman is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University within the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication and affiliated with the Institute for Language Sciences. Her research focuses on how people use language to create meaning through discourse relations, investigating cognitive processing of coherence markers in written, spoken, and visual communication.
- PhD in Language Science and Technology from Saarland University (summa cum laude, 2019)
- Research Master in Linguistics from Utrecht University (cum laude, 2015)
- Visiting researcher at Lancaster University and University of Edinburgh
Her work combines theoretical psycholinguistics with computational modeling, using quantitative empirical methods like corpus analysis and crowdsourcing experiments. Recent research examines cross-modal discourse signals across Nigerian Pidgin, English, and European languages, while methodological contributions explore annotation reliability and experimental design.
Publications demonstrate expertise in discourse markers, coherence relations, and low-resource NLP, with applications to gesture synthesis, spoken language analysis, and educational tools. She received the Veni grant for her project on natural discourse structure signals across modalities.
As an educator, she contributes to the Communication and Information Sciences (BA) and Linguistics (RMA) programs, teaching courses like Writing Style as a Choice. Her methodological innovations in crowdsourcing and annotation frameworks have shaped discourse analysis practices in computational linguistics.
