Iuliia Zaitova – Research Scientist (NLP & Speech)

Open to Research Scientist / Applied Scientist roles in industry.

Iuliia-Zaitova.jpg

Saarland University, Germany

PhD, Computational Linguistics (SFB 1102)

Saarbruecken, Germany

Finishing PhD early 2026

Summary

I’m an AI Research Scientist focused on foundation models & transformers for language and speech (LLMs, ASR, TTS). I’m completing a PhD in Computational Linguistics (Saarland University, Germany) and have industry experience as an Applied Scientist intern at Amazon (Alexa TTS, Cambridge, United Kingdom).

Current: foundation models & transformers for language and speech (LLMs, ASR, TTS)

CV · GitHub · Hugging Face

Core expertise

  • Production ML systems: large-scale LLMs, ASR, TTS (worked with 10B+ parameter models)
  • Evaluation & quality: built frameworks for regression detection and cross-lingual model comparison
  • Infrastructure: PyTorch, AWS (SageMaker, EC2), distributed training pipelines

Industry experience

Applied Scientist Intern — Amazon (Alexa TTS, Cambridge, United Kingdom)

  • Built and maintained multilingual evaluation workflows to compare models across languages and conditions
  • Investigated regression risks and model failure modes to inform deployment decisions
  • Developed scalable preprocessing and evaluation pipelines on AWS (SageMaker, EC2, S3)
  • Collaborated with applied scientists, engineers, and PMs on production voice systems

Research

  • 11 peer-reviewed publications at top ML venues (ACL, NAACL, Interspeech). Research directly applicable to production multimodal AI systems, with focus on model robustness and cross-lingual capabilities.

Currently

  • Completing my PhD (early 2026)
  • Exploring Applied Scientist / Research Scientist roles in multilingual NLP, speech, and foundation models
  • Contact: iuliiazaitova@gmail.com

selected publications

  1. It’s Not a Walk in the Park! Challenges of Idiom Translation in Speech-to-Text Systems
    Iuliia Zaitova, Badr Abdullah, Wei Xue, and 3 more authors
    In Proceedings of ACL, 2025
  2. Attention on Multiword Expressions: A Multilingual Study of BERT-based Models with Regard to Idiomaticity and Microsyntax
    Iuliia Zaitova, Vitalii Hirak, Badr Abdullah, and 3 more authors
    In Proceedings of NAACL, 2025
  3. Cross-Linguistic Intelligibility of Non-Compositional Expressions in Spoken Context
    Iuliia Zaitova, Irina Stenger, Wei Xue, and 3 more authors
    In Proceedings of Interspeech, 2024