Brikena Liko

Brikena is a third year PhD student in Computational Linguistics and is concurrently pursuing a master's degree 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 she completed advanced studies in Linguistics and Literature at the University of Tirana, Albania.

Before specializing in CL, Brikena had more than 12 years of experience as a teacher, lecturer, and editor. Following her Fulbright program, she worked for two years as a computational linguist at the Academy of Sciences of Albania. She continues to collaborate with ASA (ASHSH) on two major national projects ("The Contemporary Albanian Dictionary" and "The Albanian Encyclopedia") serving as head of the team responsible for developing and maintaining their online counterparts.

From 2024 to 2026, Brikena served as a Graduate Assistant at the University of Arizona, working with Dr. Amy Fountain and Dr. Diane Ohala on the courses LING150: Language in the World), LING150C1: Linguistics in the Digital Age, and LING/PSY/PHIL432: Psychology of Language. She also worked as a Research Assistant with Dr. Javier Osorio at the School of Government and Public Policy on a National Science Foundation supported project focused on developing and applying domain-specific large language models (LLMs) to analyze political violence.

Her primary research interests include Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Human Language Technology, Natural Language Processing for low-resource languages, and Generative Grammar. 

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