Dr. Nurit Melnik is a linguist in the Department of Language, Literature, and the Arts. Her research focuses on syntax; particularly the syntax of Modern Hebrew. Her work spans theoretical, computational, and corpus linguistics and addresses a wide range of topics, including grammar engineering, constructions and the relationship between form and function, agreement alternation, lexical and syntactic flexibility of multi-word expressions, and the cognitive aspects of language change. Melnik tests the limits of the formal approach to language, acknowledging and even celebrating the fuzziness and imperfections of real language use.
Selected publications:
Computational Literacy for the Humanities: Mathematics and Programming in Context (Routledge, 2025), with Zef Segal
Who’s Afraid of Numbers: Math and Computation for the Humanities (Raanana: The Open University of Israel, 2022)
UCxn: Typologically informed annotation of constructions atop Universal Dependencies. In Joint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024. Hybrid, Torino, Italy (pp. 16919-16932), with Weissweiler, L., Böbel, N., Guiller, K., Herrera, S., Scivetti, W., Lorenzi, A., Melnik, N., Bhatia, A., Schütze, H., Levin, L., Zeldes, A., Nivre, J., Croft, W., & Schneider, N.
A COST action on universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology. Annual Meeting of the ELRA-ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages, with Savary, A., Zeman, D., Mititelu, V. B., Barreiro, A., Caftanatov, O., De Marneffe, M. C., Dobrovoljc, K., Eryiğit, G., Giouli, V., Guillaume, B., Markantonatou, S., Melnik, N., Nivre, J., Ojha, A. K., Ramisch, C., Walsh, A., Wójtowicz, B., & Wróblewska, A. 2024.
The Chernobyl Hasidic Dynasty and Its Place in the History of Hasidism. The Zalman Shazar Center, 2014.
(2024).
ביג דאטה והמחקר הבלשני: מבט חדש על המין הדקדוקי במערכת המספר. בלשנות עברית חפ"שית, 77, 157-202.
Constructional approaches in formal grammar. Journal of Language Modelling, 11(2), 189-196. (2023)
Copy raising reconsidered. Journal of Language Modelling, 11(2), 297-341. (2023)
Agreement alternations in Modern Hebrew. In R. A. Berman (Ed.), Usage-based studies in Modern Hebrew background, morpho-lexicon, and syntax (pp. 421-464). John Benjamins Publishing Company (2020).