
‘Speech, Facial Expressions, and Gestures Cannot Lie’
Would you like to know whether a speaker’s trembling voice or an accidental gesture can give them away? At HSE University in Nizhny Novgorod, researchers are developing an algorithm that analyses speech, facial expressions, and gestures, and determines whether information is truthful with 92% accuracy. The project has applications ranging from forensic examination and bank recruitment to fundamental research. Anna Khomenko, head of the research group and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Language and Brain at the HSE Faculty of Humanities in Nizhny Novgorod, explains how students and researchers are working together to create a corpus of video recordings, train a classifier, and prepare to introduce computer vision technology.

What’s It Like to Work as a Computer Linguist
The IT industry is rapidly developing and incorporating new professions. Zoya Mazunina and Arina Mosyagina, linguists with Seldon and graduates of the HSE University Fundamental and Applied Linguistics programme, met with university applicants to talk about the computer linguist profession, issues of automatic language processing, and how linguists use the knowledge they gain at HSE University.

Towards Finding Practical Solutions to Socially Significant Healthcare Problems
The Centre for Language and Brain in Nizhny Novgorod started operations in September 2020. Today, it is comprised of a team of linguists - teachers and students - who are researching the relations between speech and parts of the brain. The Director of the Centre, Natalya E. Gronskaya, spoke to the HSE Look about how the neuro-linguistic laboratory appeared in Nizhny Novgorod, as well as current tasks and prospects the Centre can offer the students and the region.

