Ms Marissa Griesel
Project Manager: African Wordnet Node co-manager: SADiLaR Unisa Node
Biography
Marissa Griesel is the project manager for the African Wordnet and Multilingual Terminology projects at SADiLaR. She started her academic career at the NWU where she obtained a BA degree in Computational Linguistics. During this time, her interest in research for development of the South African context was sparked and she went on to complete her Masters degree in Applied Linguistics, with the title of her dissertation being “Syntactic Reordering as Pre-processing in the development of an English-Afrikaans Machine Translation System”.
Marissa is currently enrolled as a PhD student in the Department of African Languages at UNISA. Her research focuses on enhancing South African Digital Humanities through the development of specialised text resources, such as applying the African Wordnet to create semantically annotated corpora. She is passionate about interdisciplinary collaboration, and enjoys working on projects where researchers and developers from linguistics, computer science, and related fields come together to find innovative solutions for under-resourced languages. Marissa is furthermore involved in SADiLaR’s ESCALATOR project as facilitator, where crucial human capital development and empowerment in using digital tools to enhance traditional Humanities research is central.
Qualifications
MA Applied Linguistics, NWU, 2011
Work experience:
2006 – 2008: Centre for Text Technology (CTexT)- Project assistant and intern
2009 – 2012: Centre for Text Technology (CTexT)- Project manager and Computational Linguist
2009 – 2012: North-West University (NWU), School of Languages- Part-time lecturer in Language Technologies
2013 – 2017: University of South Africa (UNISA)- Research Assistant (Department of African Languages under Prof. SE Bosch)
2017 – 2023: Project Manager (UNISA node of SADiLaR)
2023 – present: South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)- Senior Project Manager and Specialist Researcher: African Wordnet
2024 – present: South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)- Unisa Node Co-manager
Contact details:
Email: marissa.griesel@nwu.ac.za