Emmanouela Christina Betsiou is an English language teacher and Ph.D. candidate. She holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature and an M.A. in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching - both from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In her Ph.D. she computationally analyzes writing quality in higher education, seeking to find out relations of corpus-internal micro and macro indices of lexical sophistication to usage-based corpus-external language. She takes particular interest in machine learning applications and explores which linguistic indices and to what extent predict essay scores and college year of study. Her research interests lie in the area of applied and computational linguistics as well as in language assessment. She has disseminated part of her work in an international symposium, engaged with workshop coordination on text analysis tools and participated in interdisciplinary research projects (e.g. Clinical Application of Computational Linguistics in People with Aphasia: From Coding to Talking; CACLA).

As a Fulbright scholar, Emmanouela Christina will spend six months at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, working with Prof. Scott Crossley. The study involves the collection of multisensory subjective estimates by adult population for target items with varying frequency and semantic representation order. This project will lead to the creation of a normative resource for English that can be used by researchers in numerous fields of study, such as psychologists and speech pathologists. The second research objective is to compare human responses to artificial intelligence (AI) ones and examine whether AI can approximate human semantic representations.