About Me

I'm a PhD student in Computational Linguistics at the University of Passau and a researcher at Zeppelin University, where I work on the BiASE AI project. I was formerly affiliated with the Exzellenzcluster 'Politics of Inequality' where I worked for the 'Computational Linguistic Analysis of Public Service Encounters' project.

I study language and power asymmetries in institutional dialogue. My dissertation draws on a large corpus of German public service encounters and Californian parole hearing transcripts to analyse the linguistic manifestation of power by e.g. analysing question-answer dynamics. More recently, I have been exploring what Large Language Models can and cannot replicate about human decision-making in high-stakes institutional contexts.

  • Education

    2017-2020: Master of Arts in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Konstanz

    2013-2017: Bachelor of Arts in Spanish Studies and Economics from the University of Konstanz

  • Professional experience

    Sep 2025 - Present: Scientific staff at the Zeppelin University (Friedrichshafen, Germany)

    Jan 2022 - Feb 2025: Scientific staff at the University of Passau

    Aug 2020 - Aug 2025: Scientific staff at the University of Konstanz

    Aug 2018 - Feb 2019: Internship at Daimler AG (Sindelfingen, Germany) Team Navigation Systems

    May 2018 - Aug 2020: Research assistant at the University of Konstanz (Germany)

  • Awards

    2019 University of Konstanz's Alumni Association (VEUK) prize for outstanding academic accomplishments

  • Associate membership

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

Publications

  • Exploring the Limits of Prompting LLMs with Speaker-Specific Rhetorical Fingerprints

    Wassiliki Siskou and Annette Hautli-Janisz
    Proceedings of the First on Natural Language Processing and Language Models for Digital Humanities (LM4DH 2025) PAPER

  • "So, are you a different person today?" Analysing Bias during Parole Hearings

    Wassiliki Siskou and Ingrid Espinoza
    Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon 2024) PAPER

  • Automated Anonymization of Parole Hearing Transcripts

    Abed Itani, Wassiliki Siskou, Annette Hautli-Janisz
    Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024 PAPER

  • PSE v1.0: The First Open Access Corpus of Public Service Encounters

    Ingrid Espinoza, Steffen Frenzel, Laurin Friedrich, Wassiliki Siskou, Steffen Eckhard, Annette Hautli-Janisz
    Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) PAPER

  • Measuring plain language in public service encounters

    Wassiliki Siskou, Laurin Friedrich, Steffen Eckhard, Ingrid Espinoza, Annette Hautli-Janisz
    Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Political Text Analysis (CPSS-2022) Potsdam, Germany. PAPER

  • Automatized Detection and Annotation for Calls to Action in Latin-American Social Media Postings

    Wassiliki Siskou, Clara Giralt Mirón, Sarah Molina-Raith, and Miriam Butt
    Proceedings of the 6th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature. International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2022. PAPER

  • Annotating very large arguments

    Kamila Gorska, Wassiliki Siskou, and Chris Reed
    Computational Models of Argument: Proceedings of COMMA 2022. editor / Francesca Toni ; Sylwia Polberg ; Richard Booth ; Martin Caminada ; Hiroyuki Kido. IOS Press BV, 2022. pp. 357-358 (Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications). 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