Ragini Menon

About Me

I am a doctoral candidate in computational and digital linguistics at Heidelberg University, supervised by Priv-Doz. Dr Sabine Tittel (Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Heidelberg University) and Prof Dr Marcus Müller (TU Darmstadt), focusing on Natural Language Processing for medieval French. My current projects are: ALMeD, a semantically rich gold-standard dataset comprising surgical and medical treatises produced in medieval France, with a special concentration on scientific terminology and HeidelBERT, an NLP toolkit and Large Language Model for medieval French, fine-tuned on ALMeD, and DEAF4NLP, a structured dataset comprising the information from the Dictionnaire Etymologique de l'ancien Français (DEAF) revamped for use as training data and in NLP application.

My research is situated within the framework of Knowledge Networks in Medieval Romania (ALMA), a 22-year project at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences that investigates the interaction between language, knowledge, and scholarship in the Romance cultural sphere where - from the 12th until the 15th century - new vernacular knowledge networks developed and the vernaculars – Medieval French, Italian, Occitan, etc., – evolved into complex languages of knowledge and scholarship.

I’m also a Lecturer at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, TU Darmstadt, where I teach courses on computational linguistics and programming. Before my academic career, I worked for several years as a consultant in the communications and public relations industry.

Education

Projects

ALMeD

Semantically rich gold-standard dataset of surgical and medical treatises from medieval France, with a focus on scientific terminology.

HF Dataset ALMA Website

HeidelBERT

NLP toolkit and LLM for medieval French, fine-tuned on ALMeD.

HF Model ALMA Website

DEAF4NLP

Structured data from the Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français (DEAF) reworked for NLP application.

HF Dataset ALMA Website

Publications

2026

2025

2024

Teaching

Contact Me