I am a lecturer at the department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester.
I obtained my combined BA+MA and PhD degrees in French and Celtic studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. I worked on comparative and early Irish literature, Old Irish grammar, and phonology of Munster Irish before switching to phonological and morphosyntactic typology and computational linguistics.
After emigrating to Israel in early 2016, and till late 2019, I was a post-doc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dividing my time between the Dynamics of Language Lab at the Department of Linguistics and the NLP lab at the Department of Computer Science. In 2019–2021 I was a guest researcher at the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University, affiliated with the NLP group and the typology group. In 2021–2023, I was a postdoc with the Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart, affiliated with the Chair of Theoretical Computational Linguistics.
I am the core creator and maintainer of the Database of Eurasian Phonological Inventories (EURPhon). I am also one of the architects of SegBo, a database of borrowed sounds in the world’s languages, iClassifier, an online research tool for analysing classifiers (a.k.a. determinatives) in ancient classifier scripts (Egyptian hieroglyphic, cuneiform, archaic Chinese), as well as contemporary classifier languages, and BivalTyp, a typological database of bivalent verbs and their encoding frames.
My research straddles the boundaries between typological and computational linguistics, digital humanities, and computational social science. I work on (and accept students interested in) data-driven methods in linguistic typology and contact linguistics, especially in phonology, analysis of large language models, multilingual NLP, and computational analysis of political discourse.
Email: mail /AT/ dnikolaev /DOT/ com
Profiles: University of Manchester | Google Scholar | ACL Anthology | Academia.edu | ResearchGate | Github | LinkedIn