Position: ML Engineer
Category: Data Science
English level: fluent
Years of experience: 6


Over the past 8 years, I have been involved in several research and development projects requiring NLP solutions. From 2015 to 2017, I worked as a research assistant at the ISP RAS Institute (I created a Russian part-of-speech tagger and contributed it to the NLTK library). In 2017, after completing my Software Engineering bachelor's degree. I worked as the lead of a newly established NLP laboratory by ISP RAS. At the laboratory, our work focused on problems of text classification, morphological, syntactic and semantic analysis, using word embeddings (e.g. fastText), language models (such as BERT, GPT) and their task-specific fine-tuning. These results have been published in international computer science journals and conferences.
One significant achievement of our team was the development of software tools for plagiarism detection in Armenian texts. These later became the foundation of my PhD thesis, which I defended in 2021 , and the resulting software system is now deployed in several higher education organizations in Armenia. Since 2022, we extended this research to also assess other aspects of text quality (structure, semantic coherence,etc.) apart from originality, and the results are currently used in RANEPA academy. The implementation of these projects required a wide range of NLP and ML technologies (from rule-based methods and smaller statistical approaches to LLMs, model fine-tuning, quantization, etc.).
In the meantime, I also supervised relatively smaller projects such as the collaboration with the INALCO institute’s DALiH project to collect from the web and classify Armenian
texts in various dialects; the addition of NER support for Armenian language to Stanford’s stanza library; collaboration with the National Library of Armenia to OCR their catalog of books and articles, etc. All of these projects helped gain specific knowledge and expertise in various text processing areas, including also data collection and preprocessing, annotation guidelines development, annotation automation and quality verification.
As the team supervisor, I mentored and facilitated the professional growth of
newcomers, overseeing the recruitment and development of the team from 5 members in 2018 to 15 members in 2023. Guiding the professional growth of my colleagues has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my work.