Nikolai Ilinykh

Since June 1, 2026, I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Data Science and AI (DSAI) division at the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers, working with Richard Johansson. I am also part of GATE.

Until June 1, 2026, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Computational Linguistics at CLASP, working with Sharid Loáiciga, Shalom Lappin, and Asad Sayeed. During this period, I focused on multimodal language understanding and generation, with particular emphasis on coreference in image-grounded narratives, discourse-level evaluation of large language(-and-vision) models, and robust methods for assessing model behavior in socially and ethically sensitive dialogue settings.

Before that, I defended my Ph.D. thesis in June 2024 at the University of Gothenburg, under the supervision of Simon Dobnik and Asad Sayeed. Prior to that, I conducted research under the mentoring of David Schlangen in the Dialogue Systems Group at the University of Bielefeld, Germany (now colabPotsdam). I received my Master’s degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrück, where I worked with Kai-Uwe Kühnberger and was supervised by Eleni Gregoromichelaki. I also hold a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from Perm State University, Russia.

My research centers on developing and evaluating computational models that generate natural language descriptions of visual content. More specifically, I focus on how coherence and coreference interact in modeling longer texts about sequences of images. I am also interested in evaluation methods for natural language generation, NLP for low-resource languages, and computational approaches to linguistic variation.