Faculty of Humanities

Publications

• Book

  Tanis K.

  Western Cinema in the USSR: The Distribution and Reception of Trophy Films after WWII

  Trophy films seized from the German film archive at the end of the Second World War were widely screened in Soviet cinemas. This monograph is the first dedicated study of these films, investigating their history in the USSR through three main perspectives: seizure and translocation, economic exploitation and reception.

  Drawing on extensive archival research, this book examines the mechanisms governing Soviet film distribution and exhibition, including planning, taxation and the everyday logistics of print circulation. It introduces previously unanalysed quantitative data on audience statistics and box-office figures to reassess the popularity of Western cinema in the USSR during the first post-war decade. Using diaries and memoirs, it explores how Soviet audiences interpreted, appropriated, and reworked Western films, tracing these practices diachronically from immediate post-war screenings to late Soviet and post-Soviet remembrance. This book demonstrates how heterogeneous experiences were gradually consolidated into a coherent narrative of ‘trophy cinema’.

  Western Cinema in the USSR is valuable for scholars and students specialising in Russian and Eurasian studies, film history and reception studies, German studies, cultural diplomacy, Cold War history, and memory studies.

  L.; NY: Routledge, 2026.

• Article

  Kasenov D., Rudnev P.

  Experimental evidence for argument ellipsis as the only derivation of Russian verb-stranding constructions

  Russian verb-stranding constructions are argued to exemplify either verb-stranding VP ellipsis (Gribanova 2013b) or argument ellipsis (Bailyn 2017; Landau 2020b). As recent work shows, the debate between verb-stranding VP ellipsis and argument ellipsis is murky due to various confounds in the employed diagnostics (Simpson 2023; Landau 2023b). This paper reports on an acceptability judgment study focused on whether the semantic type of verbal arguments influences acceptability of verb-stranding constructions (as has been observed for Hebrew by Landau 2018). The results suggest that Russian verb-stranding constructions are sensitive to the semantic type of the elided argument, supporting the argument ellipsis approach. Moreover, if a VP ellipsis derivation were available, the sentences would have an acceptable parse. The reported study thus supports the view that argument ellipsis is the only available structure for Russian verb-stranding constructions with overt subjects. We contrast the findings with Russian verb-stranding constructions that involve polarity focus and conclude that the scope of our claim is limited to verb-stranding constructions that do not involve syntactic head movement (assuming a distinction between types of head movement proposed by Harizanov & Gribanova 2019).

  Journal of Slavic Linguistics. 2026.

• Book chapter

  Копылова Е. В., Tsegoeva O. G., Берлин В. А. et al.

  Correcting or Rewriting? An Expert Evaluation of LLM-Based GEC on Academic Learner Data

  This paper investigates how large language models correct complex grammatical errors in Russian academic
  learner writing. Unlike traditional minimal-edit GEC systems, LLMs often apply generative rewriting strategies that
  may improve fluency, but risk structural overcorrection and semantic drift. We introduce a new expert benchmark
  derived from an authentic 3,1M-word learner corpus and construct an evaluation set annotated for error type and
  complexity.
  We propose an expert-driven evaluation framework combining quantitative scoring, structural-change analysis,
  and blind pairwise comparison. Results reveal a consistent minimal-edit vs. generative trade-off across LLMs. This
  trade-off has direct implications for evaluation, as purely reference-based metrics may underrepresent structural
  overcorrection and fail to capture differences in correction strategies.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  In bk.: Компьютерная лингвистика и интеллектуальные технологии: По материалам ежегодной международной конференции «Диалог». Выпуск 24.. Iss. 24. M.: Max press, 2026. P. 1-10.

• Working paper

  Zaitsev K.

  An Annotation Scheme and Classifier for Personal Facts in Dialogue

  The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled their application in personalized dialogue systems. We present an extended annotation scheme for personal fact classification that addresses limitations in existing approaches, particularly PeaCoK. Our scheme introduces new categories (Demographics, Possessions) and attributes (Duration, Validity, Followup) that enable structured storage, quality filtering, and identification of facts suitable for dialogue continuation. We manually annotated 2,779 facts from Multi-Session Chat and trained a multi-head classifier based on transformer encoders. Combined with the Gemma-300M encoder, the classifier achieves 81.6±2.6\% macro F1, outperforming all few-shot LLM baselines (best: GPT-5.4-mini, 72.92\%) by nearly 9 percentage points while requiring substantially fewer computational resources. Error analysis reveals persistent challenges in semantic boundary disambiguation, temporal aspect interpretation, and pragmatic reasoning for followup assessment. The dataset\footnotemark[1] and classifier\footnotemark[2] are publicly available.

  arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2026