Hi, I'm Igor, a PhD student at the Department of Computing Science, Umeå University.

I am defending in spring 2026 and looking for a postdoc position. Let me know if you hear of something relevant!

My main research area is around computational media studies and various related tasks such as narrative, sentiment and stance analysis. Semantic change between domains and publications is also something I find fascinating. I am curious (yet remain unconvinced) about computational fact-checking and fake news detection. More broadly, I'm interested in most things involving NLP methods as part of mixed-method approaches in computational social sciences. In my thesis work, I am focusing on narratives that manipulate agency (for instance, to anthropomorphise technology or dehumanise people) and the devices that enable them.

News & Updates

  • 📊 [11.04.2025] Presenting my research at the weekly seminar at NLPNorth
  • 🇩🇰 [15.03.2025 — 08.06.2025] For the next 3 months I am visiting Christian Hardmeier at NLPNorth (IT University of Copenhagen)
  • ⚙️🎤 [06.02.2025] Co-organised and co-hosted a doctoral student workshop 'Framing AI: Discourse and Politics of AI' at the WASP-HS Winter Conference in Stockholm with Emelie Carlsson and Johannes Geith
  • 📊 [29.11.2024] Presented our paper on the AI narratives as a contributed talk at the Workshop on Computational Social Science & Language Technology (co-located with SLTC 2024, Linköping)
  • 📊 [27.11.2024] Presented an upcoming paper on Perceived Agency in News Headlines at wedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC 2024), Linköping
  • 📄 [23.11.2024] Our article, How ChatGPT changed the media’s narratives on AI: a semi-automated narrative analysis through frame semantics' was published in Minds and Machines
  • 📍📊 [02.09.2024] Held my Midterm PhD seminar. Commitee members: Tommaso Caselli (University of Groningen) and Kai-Florian Richter (Umeå University). Thank you for the feedback!
  • 📃 [12.08.2024] The preprint of our new article with Carl Öhman and Johanna Björklund: 'How ChatGPT changed the media’s narratives on AI: a semi-automated narrative analysis through frame semantics' is available here
  • 📝🇧🇪 [27.07.2024 — 11.08.2024] Attended ESSLLI 2024 in Leuven
  • 📄📉 [19.03.2024] Presented my thesis proposal on Detecting Agency Attribution (online poster) at the EACL 2024 Student Research Workshop
  • 📉 [07.02.2024] Presented the upcoming paper on AI narrative in news media (poster) at the WASP-HS Winter Conference in Umeå
  • ⚙️ [16.01.2024 — 17.01.2024] Participated in (and co-organised) the WASP-HS workshop AI + Politics in Sigtuna
  • 📄 [06.09.2023] Our paper with H Devinney, Anton Eklund and Jingwen Cai, Developing a Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Biographies is now published in proceedings of RANLP 2023
  • 📄📊 [12.06.2023] Presented the first paper of my PhD (with Johanna Björklund), How Does the Language of ‘Threat’Vary Across News Domains? A Semi-Supervised Pipeline for Understanding Narrative Components in News Contexts at the 35th Annual Workshop of the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society
  • 🇭🇷 [02.05.2023 — 06.05.2023] Attended EACL 2023 in Dubrovnik
  • 🎤 [16.02.2023] Part of the student panel on AI and Media at the WASP-HS Winter Conference in Gothenburg

Publications

  • Ryazanov, I., Öhman, C., & Björklund, J. (2025). How ChatGPT changed the media’s narratives on AI: a semi-automated narrative analysis through frame semantics. Minds and Machines, 35(1), 1-24. [link]
  • Ryazanov, I., & Björklund, J. (2024). Thesis Proposal: Detecting Agency Attribution. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop (pp. 208-214). [link]
  • Devinney, H., Eklund, A., Ryazanov, I., & Cai, J. (2023). Developing a Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Biographies. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (pp. 285-294). [link]
  • Ryazanov, I. & Björklund, J. (2023). How Does the Language of ‘Threat’Vary Across News Domains? A Semi-Supervised Pipeline for Understanding Narrative Components in News Contexts. 35th Annual Workshop of the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society, 94-99. [link]
  • Ryazanov, I., Nylund, A. T., Basu, D., Hassellöv, I. M., & Schliep, A. (2021). Deep learning for deep waters: an expert-in-the-loop machine learning framework for marine sciences. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 9(2), 169. [link]

Teaching

  • [Spring 2025] Machine Learning (Bachelor's level), Umeå University — Teaching Assistant: refactoring and grading assignments, holding a lecture, consultation hours
  • [Autumn 2024] Artificial Intelligence (Bachelor's level), Umeå University — Teaching Assistant: grading assignments, consultation hours
  • [Spring 2024] Machine Learning (Bachelor's level), Umeå University — Teaching Assistant: grading assignments, holding a lecture, consultation hours
  • [Autumn 2023] Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence (Bachelor's level), Umeå University — Teaching Assistant: grading assignments, consultation hours
  • [Spring 2021] Applied machine learning (Master's level), Chalmers University of Technology — Teaching Assistant: grading assignments, holding consultation hours (remote)
  • [Spring 2018] E-business foundations (Bachelor's level), Higher School of Economics — Teaching Assistant: grading exams
  • Other activities

  • [February 2024 — present] Student representative on the Council for Doctoral Education, Department of Computing Science, Umeå University
  • [July 2023 — present] Board member of the doctoral section of NTK student union, Faculty of Science and Technology, Umeå University
  • [11.06.2024] Co-organised Doctoral Student and Supervisor Day 2024 at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Umeå University