Collaboration between leading Ukrainian universities opens up new horizons for young researchers! Over a two-month period (April–May) in 2026, on the initiative of Associate Professor Oksana Taran, students from the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) – Maria-Veronika Filatova and Oleksandra Semenko – undertook a professional placement at the Department of Intelligent Computer Systems at the National Technical University ‘Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute’ (NTU ‘KhPI’). 🏛️💻
The internship was supervised by the renowned researcher, compiler of the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of the Ukrainian Language (GRAC), and Associate Professor at the Department of Intelligent Computer Systems, Maria Shvedova.
📊 Two months of intensive digital immersion:
The programme was packed with content and combined in-depth theory with individual practical tasks in the field of corpus linguistics:
-
- Working with big data: the students mastered the principles of working with metadata and the intricacies of meta-tagging.
- Digitisation of periodicals: a workshop on optical character recognition (OCR) to populate the GRAK corpus. The students fully prepared the 1990s issues of the newspapers *Vechirniy Kyiv*, *Kultura i Zhittya* and *Molod Ukrainy* for uploading to the corpus (from scanned copies to recognised text with metadata).
- Creating parallel corpora: Maria-Veronika carried out a tremendous amount of technical work for the ParaRook corpus, aligning the Spanish-language original of Ignacio Cárdenas Acuña’s novella *The Mystery of One Sunday* with its Ukrainian translation. 🇪🇸↔️🇺🇦
Following the successful defence of their work, Maria-Veronika and Oleksandra received official certificates, which will be credited towards their fourth year of study. 📑🎓
🌐 The wide-ranging partnership between UCU and KhPI
This initiative is a tangible outcome of the cooperation agreement between the universities, signed in 2025. Our partnership has many exciting aspects:
-
- KhPI students studied ‘Corpus Linguistics’ under the supervision of Maria Shvedova during an internship in Jena.
- Ms Shvedova acted as a reviewer for the bachelor’s thesis of student Angelina Popovich, who successfully defended her corpus-based research with a ‘distinction’. 👍
- Students and lecturers from both universities are jointly participating in the University of Helsinki’s (Finland) international project “Digital Humanities: Ensuring Ukrainian University Teaching in Times of Crisis”.
We’d like to thank our colleagues for their excellent collaboration, and the students for their perseverance and significant contribution to the development of Ukrainian corpus resources! There’s more to come! 🚀💎