Faculty of Humanities

Publications

• Book

  Samadi M.

  Women and Martyrdom in Stalinist War Cinema: Russia's Eternal Quest for Messianism

  This monograph examines representations of women and martyrdom in Soviet war cinema of the Stalin era through an analysis of eight fictional films made between 1941 and 1953, that is from the German invasion of the USSR to the end of Stalin’s regime. It challenges the narrative maintaining that traditional gender differences were radically undone within Stalinist political culture, by demonstrating the extent to which cinematic gender roles were deeply rooted in the Russian Orthodox religious tradition.

  The findings of this monograph contribute to the key discourses on Soviet modernity which concur that Stalinist policies were not coherently shaped by Marxist-Leninist ideology, but rather by particularistic traits, above all, traditional Russian Orthodox values. This book examines the female and martyrdom theme as mediator between, on the one hand, ideal female heroism and patriotic duty, and on the other hand, the everyday responsibilities of Soviet women as citizens and as family members. This study sheds new light on the impact of Russian cultural heritage on the Stalinist Ideological State Apparatuses, revealing strong connections between Russian particularism and Soviet universalism.

  Mozhgan Samadi is Associate Professor at the HSE University, Moscow. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester, UK. Her main research interests include state-nation relations, women studies, religious studies, and cinema studies in Russia and the Middle East.

  Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024.

• Article

  Trnavac R., Hidalgo Tenorio E.

  Breach of pacta sunt servanda: A corpus-assisted analysis of newspaper discourse on the AUKUS agreement

  The AUKUS agreement, a strategic pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and
  the United States, primarily aimed to facilitate Australia's acquisition of eight nuclearpowered
  submarines from the US and Britain. This agreement led to the abrupt
  termination of a previous contract with France's state-owned Naval Group. This article
  examines the language used in media coverage of the AUKUS agreement in
  newspapers from various Anglophone and Asian countries. Employing a combination
  of Sentiment Analysis (Crossley et al., 2017) and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies
  (Partington, 2013; Gillings et al., 2023), we focus on identifying key linguistic patterns,
  themes, and the sentiment embedded in the discourse. Our findings indicate a general
  positive assessment of AUKUS in the Anglophone media, contrasted with negative
  portrayals in Chinese publications. Moreover, the analysis of linguistic components
  such as adjectives, nouns, and verbs reveals underlying complexities and conflicting
  viewpoints within the Anglophone discourse itself. By applying Corpus-Assisted
  Discourse Studies, we uncover the contextual and linguistic factors that shape these
  diverse perspectives.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  APPLIED CORPUS LINGUISTICS. 2025.

• Book chapter

  Rykov E., Zaytsev K., Anisimov I. et al.

  SmurfCat at PAN 2024 TextDetox: Alignment of Multilingual Transformers for Text Detoxification

  This paper presents a solution for the Multilingual Text Detoxification task in the PAN-2024 competition of the SmurfCat team. Using data augmentation through machine translation and a special filtering procedure, we collected an additional multilingual parallel dataset for text detoxification. Using the obtained data, we fine-tuned several multilingual sequence-to-sequence models, such as mT0 and Aya, on a text detoxification task. We applied the ORPO alignment technique to the final model. Our final model has only 3.7 billion parameters and achieves state-of-the-art results for the Ukrainian language and near state-of-the-art results for other languages. In the competition, our team achieved first place in the automated evaluation with a score of 0.52 and second place in the final human evaluation with a score of 0.74.

  In bk.: CLEF 2024 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2024. P. 2866-2871.

• Working paper

  Konstantin Zaitsev.

  Exploring the Effectiveness of Methods for Persona Extraction

  The paper presents a study of methods for extracting information about dialogue participants and evaluating their performance in Russian. To train models for this task, the Multi-Session Chat dataset was translated into Russian using multiple translation models, resulting in improved data quality. A metric based on the F-score concept is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the extraction models. The metric uses a trained classifier to identify the dialogue participant to whom the persona belongs. Experiments were conducted on MBart, FRED-T5, Starling-7B, which is based on the Mistral, and Encoder2Encoder models. The results demonstrated that all models exhibited an insufficient level of recall in the persona extraction task. The incorporation of the NCE Loss improved the model's precision at the expense of its recall. Furthermore, increasing the model's size led to enhanced extraction of personas.

  arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2024