Brikena Liko

Brikena is a PhD student in Computational Linguistics with a Minor in Computer Science. She holds a Master’s degree in Computational Linguistics from Montclair State University in New Jersey, where she was a Fulbright student, and a Master of Science in Linguistics from the University of Tirana in Albania.

Before focusing more on computational linguistics, Brikena gained over 12 years of experience as a teacher, lecturer, and editor. After the Fulbright program, she worked as a computational linguist at the Academy of Sciences of Albania for two years and continues collaborating with them on two major national projects ("The Contemporary Albanian Dictionary" and "The Albanian Encyclopedia") as head of the team leading their online counterparts.

During 2024-2025 she worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Arizona, working with Dr. Amy Fountain and Dr. Diane Ohala for the courses LING150 (Language in the World) and LING/PSY/PHIL432 (Psychology of Language). She is currently working as a Research Assistant at the School of Government and Public Policy for an NSF supported project focused on developing and using domain-specific large language models (LLMs) for analyzing political violence.

Main Research Interests:

Computational Linguistics, Human Language Technology, Natural Language Processing for low-resource languages, Generative Grammar 

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brikenaliko/