ZLATA KIKTEVA

Computational Linguist

I’m a PhD student in Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing at the University of Passau, supervised by Prof. Dr. Hautli-Janisz. I work within the DeLab project, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. In my research I favour an interdisciplinary approach, combining theoretical insights with computational models of language. I’m particularly interested in argumentation (both its theoretical foundations and its application in argument mining) as well as pragmatics and its computational treatment.

• Education

  • 2019-2021: Master of Arts in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Konstanz (Germany)

  • 2014-2018: Bachelor of Arts in Translation studies from the Kyiv National Linguistic University (Ukraine)

• Work experience

  • Jan 2022-Present: Scientific staff at the University of Passau (Germany)

  • Aug 2021-Dec 2021: Scientific staff at the University of Konstanz (Germany)

  • Oct 2019-Jul 2021: Research assistant at the University of Konstanz (Germany)

• Associate membership

  • 2022-Present: Centre for Argument Technology (University of Dundee, Scotland, UK)

• Awards

  • 2021 University of Konstanz’s Alumni Association (VEUK) prize for outstanding academic accomplishments

Publications

• Mining Complex Patterns of Argumentative Reasoning in Natural Language Dialogue

  Ramon Ruiz-Dolz, Zlata Kikteva, John Lawrence
  In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025. PAPER
  

• DebArgVis: An Interactive Visualisation Tool for Exploring Argumentative Dynamics in Debate

  Martin Gruber, Zlata Kikteva, Ignaz Rutter, Annette Hautli-Janisz
  In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Argument Mining, 2025. PAPER
  

• Looking at the Unseen: Effective Sampling of Non-Related Propositions for Argument Mining

  Ramon Ruiz-Dolz, Debela Gemechu, Zlata Kikteva, Chris Reed
  In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2025. PAPER
  

• Question Type Prediction in Natural Debate

  Zlata Kikteva, Alexander Trautsch, Steffen Herbold, Annette Hautli-Janisz
  In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2024. PAPER
  

• Large Language Models Can Impersonate Politicians and Other Public Figures

  Steffen Herbold, Alexander Trautsch, Zlata Kikteva, Annette Hautli-Janisz
  arXiv preprint, 2024. PAPER
  

• Disagreement on Reddit: An Empirical Study

  Zlata Kikteva and Annette Hautli-Janisz
  Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Argumentation in the Cognitive Dimension of Social Argumentation (Vol. 111), College Publications, 2024.

• On the Impact of Reconstruction and Context for Argument Prediction in Natural Debate

  Zlata Kikteva, Alexander Trautsch, Patrick Katzer, Mirko Oest, Steffen Herbold, Annette Hautli-Janisz
  In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining, 2023. PAPER
  

• A Large-scale Comparison of Human-written versus ChatGPT-generated Essays

  Steffen Herbold, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Ute Heuer, Zlata Kikteva, and Alexander Trautsch
  Scientific Reports 13, 2023. PAPER
  

• The Keystone Role Played by Questions in Debate

  Zlata Kikteva, Kamila Gorska, Wassiliki Siskou, Annette Hautli-Janisz, and Chris Reed
  In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, at COLING 2022, 2022. PAPER
  

• QT30: A Corpus of Argument and Conflict in Broadcast Debate

  Annette Hautli-Janisz, Zlata Kikteva, Wassiliki Siskou, Kamila Gorska, Ray Becker, and Chris Reed
  In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022), European Language Resources Association, 2022. PAPER
  

Conference talks

• DeLab: Explainable Automatic Moderation for Online Deliberation

  Zlata Kikteva and Henrike Beyer
  VolkswagenStiftung Final Symposium ‘AI and the Society of the Future’, April 2025, Hannover, Germany. PRESENTATION
  

• Dimensions of Inequality in Broadcast Political Debate

  Zlata Kikteva and Annette Hautli-Janisz
  In_equality Conference 2024, Konstanz, Germany. PRESENTATION
  

• The Dynamics of Framing in Dialogue

  Zlata Kikteva, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Chris Reed, Steve Oswald, Christopher Klamm, Wassiliki Siskou, Meghdut Sengupta, Manfred Stede, and Henning Wachsmuth
  DGfS Annual Meeting 2024, Bochum, Germany. PRESENTATION
  

• Incorporating Cognitive Evidence in a Computational Model for Persuasiveness

  Zlata Kikteva, Jennifer Schumann, Annette Hautli-Janisz, and Steve Oswald
  56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2023), Athens, Greece. PRESENTATION
  

• Strategies for Disagreeing on Reddit

  Zlata Kikteva and Annette Hautli-Janisz
  4th European Conference on Argumentation (ECA 2022), Rome, Italy. PRESENTATION
  

• Types of Disagreement on Reddit

  Zlata Kikteva and Annette Hautli-Janisz
  4th European Conference on Argumentation (ECA 2022), Rome, Italy. PRESENTATION
  

Teaching activities

• Natural Language Processing for Social Media Analysis

  Lecture and tutorial at the Computer Science and Mathematics Faculty, University of Passau
  Winter semester 2022-2023, 2023-2024, 2024-2025

• LLMs for Linguistic Research: Opportunities and Pitfalls

  Tutorial at the DGfS Annual Meeting 2024
  27th February, 2024

• Analysing Arguments in Political Debate

  Block proseminar at the English Department, University of Fribourg
  September 2023

• Statistics

  Tutorial at the Linguistics Department, University of Konstanz
  Summer semester 2020, Winter semester 2020-2021

• Machine Language Processing

  Tutorial at the Linguistics Department, University of Konstanz
  Winter semester 2020-2021