1. Why are you interested in the study of inequality?
Inequality is a really pressing and ubiquitous issue. As a person with a background in linguistics, I am especially interested in how the use of „powerful“ or „persuasive" languages can change people's perception of inequality.
2. What are you working on?
My dissertation is about using natural language processing methods to automatically detect linguistic cues for framing. I mainly work on German newspaper articles about the refugee crisis from 2015-2018. The goal is to investigate how refugees and the refugee crisis are portrayed in newspapers with different styles (tabloid vs. broadsheet) and political orientations.
3. How did you end up here?
With the various student assistant jobs during my Master’s studies and the work on my Master thesis, I got my first taste of research. Then I learned about the project "Framing Inequalities". Here was a place I could put my skills in computational linguistics and natural language processing to use to analyze real-world language materials. It has piqued my interest, and that’s how I ended up here!
4. Recent highlight?
I am going to do a poster representation about my work on coinage compounds at the International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA) from June 27 till July 02, 2021. I'm excited - this is my very first submission during my PhD!
Qi Yu was a PhD candidate at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz. She was a member of the Cluster project "Framing Inequalities". Her research interests are theoretical linguistics (common ground modeling, modal particles and discourse particles in German), Computational Linguistics and natural language processing (automatic annotation with rich linguistic knowledge, knowledge representation).