Gaurish Pandurang Thakkar, PhD, assistant professor

Office hours: Thursdays, 10:30–11:00 AM, room E-315 (by prior arrangement via email)
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Dr Gaurish Pandurang Thakkar holds a degree in computer science and worked as a software engineer and data scientist in India before turning to natural language processing research. He completed his PhD in 2022 on cross-lingual sentiment analysis for under-resourced EU Slavic languages, carried out within the Horizon 2020 CLEOPATRA Innovative Training Network, under the supervision of Prof. Nives Mikelić Preradović and Prof. Marko Tadić. He is employed as an assistant professor at the Department of Information and Communication Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, where he also serves as the ECTS Coordinator for Erasmus exchange.

His research focuses on natural language processing, sentiment analysis for under-resourced and Slavic languages, cross-lingual transfer, and the development of large language models, including the Croatian language model project HR-XR-XTEND project (HR-GPT Beta).

Projects:

• H2020 CLEOPATRA – Cross-lingual Event-centric Open Analytics Research Academy (2019–2023)
• EU European Language Equality 2 – ComFac4LT – Computing Facilities for LT (2023)
• EU "Unified Transcription and Translation for Extended Reality (UTTER)" – Croatian Extended Reality Extensions (HR-XR-XTEND) (2024)
• HRVOJE-M (2026–2029)

Research interests:

• Natural language processing (NLP)
• Sentiment analysis in low-resource languages
• Cross-lingual transfer
• Development and application of large language models (LLMs)
• Language resources and corpus linguistics

Courses:

• Language Engineering
• Natural Language Processing
• Language Engineering for Digital Linguists

List of publications in the Croatian Scientific Bibliography (CROSBI)
Google Scholar profile