Alba Haveriku is a third-year PhD student in the Faculty of Information Technology, Polytechnic University of Tirana. Her research work lies in the intersection of natural language processing and eye-tracking, focusing on her native language , Albanian.
During September I spent a couple of weeks at the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich, starting the data collection phase for the Albanian language. Together with Anna and Thyra we tested all the experimental materials to make sure everything ran smoothly once the participants arrived.
A particular special part of this experience was meeting Albanians living in Switzerland, from students to professionals, and seeing their enthusiasm to contribute to research in their native language. Each session felt like a small but meaningful step toward enriching the resources available for Albanian and including it in a multilingual project such as MultiplEYE.
Visiting Zurich and working at the DiLi lab gave me the chance to gain valuable hands-on experience and deepen my understanding of eye-tracking research. We now have the first initial corpus of eye-tracking while reading in Albanian, which I hope we will have the possibility to expand further on. This contribution helps expand the linguistic diversity of the MultiplEYE project and promote Albanian as a research language within the broader computational linguistics community.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to all the participants. It was a pleasure to meet such wonderful people and I’m thankful for the new connections and friendships that came out of this experience.
A heartfelt thank you to Anna, Thyra and Lena, as well as to the MultiplEYE project, for this opportunity and all the learning and experience gained throughout the years.