Researcher of the Month: Eliisa Uotila

Photo: Panu Koski

Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Eliisa Uotila, PhD student at University of Helsinki, Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, tells us about her ongoing research on the Easy-to-Read Finnish corpora available in the Language Bank.

Who are you?

I am Eliisa Uotila, PhD student at the University of Helsinki (Finnish language). After master’s degree I have been working for a couple of years and now I am back at university again. Earlier in my studies I ran across easy to read language and got interested in it. I already made my master’s thesis about it and also started working with it in the Finnish Centre for Easy to Read. Now it feels good to be able to do research on it again.

What is your research topic?

My PhD study is about explaining things in written easy to read Finnish. Explaining is one of the fundamental things in easy to read texts (difficult /rare words, background information etc.) I study how these explanations have been made and what kind of a reader is construed through these explanations. My theoretical background is in cognitive linguistics.

How is your research related to Kielipankki?

My data consists of both individual texts in easy to read as well as corpora. From the texts I outline the methods and strategies that are used in explaining and then I compare the use of these strategies in corpora (easy to read and standard Finnish).
Kielipankki has now easy to read newspaper corpora available as part of the Corpus of Finnish Magazines and Newspapers from the 1990s and 2000s, Version 2Corpus of Finnish Magazines and Newspapers from the 1990s and 2000s, Version 2 (E2R newspaper Selkosanomat 2006 – 2013, E2R magazine Leija 2009 -2016) and The Language Bank is currently processing a corpora derived from the Yle news in easy to read, with the source data corpus Yle News Archive Easy-to-read Finnish 2011-2018, source already available for download.

The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.

All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive.