People

Maria Reile

Maria is the project manager of the microcopy project and research fellow in experimental pragmatics at the University of Tartu. Her main research interests lie in exploring how linguistic semantics is related to the speakers’ perception and how language functions in real-life usage. She defended her doctoral dissertation in 2019, exploring the use of Estonian demonstratives (e.g., see ‘this’ and too ’that’) and their connection to spatial perception.

Currently her research interests include the semantics of scalar words (e.g., mõned ’some’ and sageli ’often’) and their interpretation in relation to usage context and the speakers’ sociodemographic background (e.g., how often is often when alcohol consumption is compared with being physically active); the use of demonstratives, but in a smaller scale and in collaboration with Referential Practices research group; and finally language use in digital environments, focusing on the interplay between linguistic devices and design components in creating meaning and user-friendliness – the topic that this project is dedicated to.

Kristiina Vaik

Kristiina is a research fellow in computational linguistics at the University of Tartu. Her main interests include the application of computational methods to large language corpora and teaching students practical skills in this field. She defended her doctoral dissertation in 2024 at the University of Tartu, where she proposed a new theoretical framework for automatic categorisation of web texts. In addition to her academic work, she has worked as a data scientist at a private company TEXTA, actively participated in several language technology projects, and taught computational linguistics to both BA and MA students.

Her research interests include automatic processing of natural language, including morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as statistical data analysis and automatic classification of unstructured texts. In the microcopy project, Kristiina contributes her expertise by supporting multimodal corpus compilation and conducting statistical analysis on the corpus data.

Katri Selg

Katri is a service designer and user experience designer at Trinidad Wiseman. She has a over 10 years of experience in the field and holds a master’s degree in service design and management from the University of Tartu.

Katri is an experienced user researcher and workshop conductor. Her daily tasks include conducting user interviews and user observations, usability testing and implementing new solutions. She joined the work group because of personal interest in how text and design work together – from her work experience, she knew that this is strongly connected to user experience.

She has always been interested in how the designers should “talk” to the users through the system, so it would be simple and intuitive for the user. What words to choose for a specific functionality and how to phrase your texts effectively?

Anu Kadri Uustalu

Anu Kadri is an MA student at the University of Tartu, majoring in linguistics. While she is interested in several fields in linguistics, her main focus is semantics. She has a background in arts and design from her BA studies, which led her to the microcopy project. The project offers an opportunity to study together two topics that she enjoys – language and design. Her MA thesis is also connected to the project: she explores the phrasing and design of cookie notifications in Estonian.

In the microcopy project, Anu Kadri helps with corpus compilation and data tagging, and actively contributes to project discussions.

Meelika Tiilen

Meelika is an entrepreneur who teaches Estonian to adult learners. She is currently pursuing an MA in teaching at the University of Tartu and holds a BA degree in Estonian from the same university.

Meelika got interested in the microcopy project as she had noticed for a while how the language use in the web has become increasingly like spoken language over the years. Her MA thesis also focuses on microcopy, specifically how L1 and L2 Estonian speakers perceive politeness in Estonian microcopy.

Although Meelika is not actively working in the project at the moment, during the first year (January–November 2024) she contributed by compiling and tagging the corpus data, and participating actively in the research group discussions.

Anastasia Šepilenko

Anastasia is an MA student in linguistics at the University of Tartu. Her research interests primarily lie in the semantics of scalar words. She holds a BA in Germanics (German language). She joined the microcopy project to gain experience across different areas of linguistic.

In the project, Anastasia helps with corpus compilation and tagging, and actively contributes to project discussions.