CV

Research Associate

• Fritz Thyssen Foundation-funded project on experimental argument analysis, working with Prof. Eugen Fischer and Dr Paul Engelhardt across an interdisciplinary team of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists. Designed and administered large-scale questionnaire studies via Prolific and Qualtrics; conducted hierarchical cluster analysis, mixed-effects modelling, and regression analyses in R; co-authored publications and conference presentations.

PhD Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

• Title: "Navigating Meaning Spaces: A Contextualist Perspective on Conceptual Engineering". Supervised by Prof. Kasia Jaszczolt. One examiner had no corrections, the other minor corrections.

Research Master of Arts, Linguistics

• Thesis: "Nullius In Verba: Conceptual Engineering and the Royal Society Corpus", supervised by Lauren Fonteyn and Janet Connor. Achieved Cum Laude Honours.

BA Linguistics

• Thesis: "Language Contact and the Phylogeny and Phonology of Early English", supervised by David Willis. Achieved First Class Honours.

From Words to Propositions; Rethinking Meaning Construction in Conceptual Engineering

• Haket, N. (Forthcoming). From Words to Propositions: Rethinking Meaning Construction in Conceptual Engineering. Synthese [Q1; top-ranked philosophy journal].

When stereotypical inferences prevail in polysemy processing; Explaining fallacies of equivocation

• Fischer, E., Stanton, K., Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, D., Haket, N. & Engelhardt, P. When stereotypical inferences prevail in polysemy processing: Explaining fallacies of equivocation. Mind and Language [Q1 in Linguistics and Language; Q1 in Philosophy]. Revisions in progress.

Conceptual Engineering in the Age of Emerging Tech; A Bottom-Up Approach to Lexical Semantics

• Haket, N. Conceptual Engineering in the Age of Emerging Tech: A Bottom-Up Approach to Lexical Semantics. In Conceptual Engineering for Emerging Technologies (eds. Isaac, Frank & Hopster). Routledge. Revisions in progress.

Language Under Construction; Conceptual Engineering and Linguistics

• Haket, N. Language Under Construction: Conceptual Engineering and Linguistics. Handbook chapter. Under review.

BERT's Conceptual Cartography; Mapping the Landscapes of Meaning

• Haket, N. & Daniels, R. (2025). BERT's Conceptual Cartography: Mapping the Landscapes of Meaning. ACL Anthology: Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 8th meeting. https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.3145

Collaborative Conceptual Engineering; Philosophy and Linguistics

• Haket, N. (2024). Collaborative Conceptual Engineering: Philosophy and Linguistics. In Conceptual Engineering: Methodological and Metaphilosophical Issues (P. Stalmaszczyk, ed.). Brill. https://doi.org/10.30965/9783969753026_012

Could this be next for corpus linguistics?

• Fonteyn, L., Manjavacas, E., Haket, N., Dorst, A. & Kruijt, E. (2024). Could this be next for corpus linguistics? Methods of semi-automatic data annotation with contextualised word embeddings. Linguistics Vanguard. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2022-0142

Nullius In Verba; Conceptual Engineering and the Royal Society Corpus

• Haket, N. (2023). Nullius In Verba: Conceptual Engineering and the Royal Society Corpus. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 15, 155–195.

Language Contact and the Phylogeny and Phonology of Early English

• Haket, N. (2021). Language Contact and the Phylogeny and Phonology of Early English. Journal of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Great Britain, 1(1), 1–32.

• Shortlisted for the Trinity College Junior Research Fellowship (Cambridge), a highly competitive early-career award attracting hundreds of applicants from leading global universities.

• International Pragmatics Association Conference Full Bursary. Competitive funding for presentation at the premier international pragmatics conference, Brisbane.

• TAL Research Area Workshops (RAW) funding to organise a student-led interdisciplinary workshop.

• Cambridge Trust International Scholarship for full PhD funding, covering tuition and living expenses for exceptional international students.

• Sufian Passamano Prize for Linguistics. Awarded for outstanding academic achievement in linguistics.
• Bateman Scholarship. Elected fellowship for maintaining First-Class Honours classification throughout undergraduate degree.

Research Assistant

• Linguistic, Cognitive, and Ethical Dimensions of Classical Rabbinic Midrash.

• Annotating and analysing qualitative data from experiments investigating how participants interpret ambiguous or unconventional linguistic stimuli.
• Examining how speakers extend or reshape lexical meaning in ways that mirror broader processes of semantic change and meaning negotiation.

Research Associate

• Fritz Thyssen Foundation-funded project on experimental argument analysis, working with Prof. Eugen Fischer and Dr Paul Engelhardt.

• Designed and administered questionnaire-based studies recruiting participants via Prolific and Qualtrics, generating and quality-controlling datasets of 1,000+ records per study.
• Facilitated focus groups with annotation teams to establish coding criteria, resolve inter-rater disagreements, and ensure qualitative consistency across annotation rounds.
• Conducted hierarchical cluster analysis, mixed-effects modelling, and regression analyses in R; results contribute to a manuscript currently under revision at Mind and Language (Q1).
• Co-authored conference abstracts and journal publications; reviewed literature across linguistics, psychology, and philosophy.

Doctoral Research Project

• Developed and deployed corpus-based, computational, and experimental methods to investigate how linguistic framing constructs propositional content and shapes conceptual representation.

• Corpus strand; compiled and systematically analysed a corpus of public texts from the British National Corpus using BERT-based distributional semantic models, mapping lexical clustering across discourse contexts.
• Experimental strand; designed and implemented multiple questionnaire-based participant studies, generating datasets analysed through full statistical modelling in R (CLMMs, ordinal regression, Wilcoxon tests).
• Produced 4 peer-reviewed publications across Q1 journals and competitive international venues; 4 further outputs in press or under review.
• Delivered 12+ international conference presentations, including 3 invited talks.

Research Assistant

• Working Research Assistant on an experimental philosophy project led by Dr Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and Prof Eugen Fischer.

• Manually annotated 1,000+ linguistic tokens, applying and refining a detailed multi-layer annotation schema for semantic and pragmatic features.
• Contributed to the development, testing, and documentation of the project's coding framework, including resolving edge cases and improving inter-annotator reliability.
• Annotations contributed to an in-development paper on the lexical semantics of "imagine".

Dawn Supercomputer Pioneer Project

• Selected as a Pioneer Project member with early access to the Dawn Supercomputer (Intel × Dell Technologies), working on high-performance computational linguistics research.
• Produced substantial research outputs including three conference presentations, a chapter in an edited volume, and a peer-reviewed methodology paper in the Society for Computation in Linguistics proceedings.

Research Assistant

• Contributed to the design and compilation of a corpus of historical English texts for a funded interdisciplinary project building transformer-based language models.
• Developed annotation protocols applied systematically across 1,500+ records; collaborated with computational linguists, NLP researchers, and historians of language.
• Work directly contributed to a peer-reviewed publication in Linguistics Vanguard (Fonteyn et al., 2024) and an international conference presentation.

Researcher

• Provided linguistic input to a previously philosophy-only domain, resulting in multiple publications and conference presentations.
• Conducted independent research and prepared presentations.

Student Assistant

• Supported an international workshop on ethical questions in linguistic research.
• Responsibilities included workshop preparation, material collation, publication coordination, and communications with participants across varied disciplines.

*Linguistics, Conceptual Engineering, and the Spectrum Between Them. University of Cambridge Semantics, Pragmatics, and Philosophy Research Group Meeting.

BERT's Conceptual Cartography: Mapping the Landscapes of Meaning. 8th meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL), University of Oregon.

Conceptual Landscaping with BERT and Friends — Methodology Lightning Talk. 8th meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL), University of Oregon. Co-presented with Ryan Daniels.

(Meta)Pragmatics in Conceptual Engineering — Choosing the Best Words Panel. 19th International Pragmatics Association Conference, Brisbane. Supported by competitive full bursary covering all registration, travel, and accommodation.

Deconstructing Arguments from the Bottom Up: An Empirical Approach to Verbal Reasoning. 5th European Experimental Philosophy Conference, Norwich.

The Forgotten Pragmatic Aspect of Conceptual Engineering. 6th International Conference of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA), Florida.

Why Making Words Better Is Not That Simple: Conceptual Engineering and Distributional Semantics. 11th Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies (IVACS) Conference, Cambridge.

*Why Making Words Better Is Not That Simple: Conceptual Engineering and Distributional Semantics. Pre-conference workshop, 4th Experimental Philosophy Conference on Large Language Models for Experimental Philosophy, Kraków. Co-presented with Ryan Daniels.

*Intra- and Inter-word Variation in Conceptual Engineering. Conceptual Engineering Network (CEN) Lecture, virtual. Watch lecture here.

Conceptual Engineering: Fixing the Concept of NOW in Russian. Workshop on Abstract Concepts, Perception, and Language: What We Think and How We Say It, Cambridge.

*Empirical Dilemmas in Conceptual Engineering: Words and Beyond. Pre-conference workshop, 3rd European Experimental Philosophy Conference on The Dawn of Experimental Conceptual Engineering, Zurich.

Nullius in Verba: Conceptual Engineering and the Royal Society Corpus. 18th International Pragmatics Association Conference, Brussels.

Collaborative Conceptual Engineering. 8th International Conference on the Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, Łódź.

Lecturer, Semantics and Pragmatics (TAL Tripos and MPhil, MMLL)

• Delivered a lecture series for undergraduate and MPhil students. Topics included truth-conditional semantics, Gricean pragmatics, relevance theory, and the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Undergraduate Supervisor

• Four years of small-group supervision (2–6 students per group) across multiple Cambridge colleges. Provided detailed written and oral feedback on weekly essays; adapted teaching to students at widely varying levels of prior knowledge; worked consistently with Student Support Documents. Identified a structural problem in supervision group organisation and successfully advocated for a change in departmental practice.

• Li2: Structures and Meanings (Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics)
• Li10: Semantics and Pragmatics (Advanced Semantics and Pragmatics)
• Li4: History and Varieties of English (Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics)

Dissertation Supervisor

• Supervised extended independent research projects in semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. Dissertation supervision at Cambridge is typically reserved for more senior academic staff.

• "The Flirting Game: A pragmatic analysis of collaborative meaning negotiation in flirting interactions." The student achieved a high first-class mark (2024–25).

Project Supervisor

• Supervised student research projects across multiple schemes.

• Pembroke Cambridge Summer Programme: "Cross-cultural construction of death: A multimodal contrastive study of obituary discourse in Chinese and American media."
• Foundation Year Programme: "Tag questions, interrogatives and gender: linguistic weakness or conversational strategy?"

Co-Organiser, 11th Biennial Experimental Pragmatics Conference (XPRAG 2025)

• Co-organised one of the field's flagship international conferences: a three-day event with 250 attendees across in-person and online components. Responsibilities included speaker invitation and coordination, programme scheduling, promotional materials, and participant communications.

Organiser, Abstract Concepts, Perception, and Language Workshop

• Independently conceived, secured competitive TAL Research Area Workshops funding for, and delivered a one-day interdisciplinary workshop. Managed all aspects including call for abstracts, speaker selection, catering, promotional materials, and day-of coordination.

Organiser, LaTeX Workshop

• Designed and delivered a practical skills workshop for linguistics postgraduates on document preparation, bibliography management, and formatting for academic submission.

Communications Assistant Editor, Languages, Society and Policy Journal

• An open-access journal publishing high-quality peer-reviewed language research addressing issues of languages, cultures, and societies in accessible, non-technical language, with a mission to promote engagement with policymakers, journalists, and stakeholders in education, health, and business. Responsibilities include maintaining and updating the journal website, distributing calls for papers, and managing author correspondence throughout the submission process.

Organiser, Semantics, Pragmatics and Philosophy Workgroup

• Founded and convene a bi-weekly Cambridge University meeting in which authors of recently published papers are invited to discuss their work. Responsibilities include selecting papers for discussion, contacting and briefing authors, moderating meetings, and communicating with a university-wide membership. Maintained consistent programming across three years.

Editor, Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics

• Delivered three annual volumes as sole editor without a missed deadline: solicited and assessed submissions, managed all author correspondence, proofread and copy-edited accepted manuscripts, oversaw LaTeX typesetting, and managed print and digital distribution.

Presentation at the AI Café

• Presentation at the AI Café organised by CL Accelerate Science to exemplify work that can be done with LLMs, July 2024.

ANNOTATED. Episode 01 - Nina Haket

• Podcast recording for the Blog of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain, explaining my research and advising current undergraduate students. Find episode here.

In Search of a Language Utopia

• Magazine article written in The Low Countries, an academic magazine targeting all aspects of language and culture. Lichtsteiner, L., & Haket, N. (2021). In Search of a Language Utopia. The Low Countries, 4(4).

Student Ambassador

• Student Ambassador for the Trinity Hall "You'll Fit In" residential programme, a free programme for Year 12 students considering applying to Cambridge who belong to underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.

Referee

• Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science