Stella Bullo · Linguistics Engineer & Applied Language Specialist (EN/ES)
This site hosts essays and research dossiers on language, annotation, and applied language interfaces. It connects linguistic inquiry with the prototypes and tools I develop from my work on communication and meaning.
Articles & Research Dossiers
Work that traces how linguistic insight moves from research into frameworks, white papers, annotation practices, and explainable language tools — where analytical thinking meets applied linguistic engineering.
Meaning & modelling
What metaphor and language patterns reveal about how people conceptualise experience, and how linguistic modelling can support sentiment, appraisal, and explainable interfaces across domains.
Read articlesAnnotation & evaluation
Why annotation is a form of linguistic interpretation, and how careful tag design, evaluation criteria, and clear prompting shape model behaviour. A look at the linguistic thinking behind training, QA, and dataset quality.
Read articlesResearch → application
A case study showing how research into endometriosis experiences, first explored in my Language of Endometriosis project, evolved into the prototype Explain My Pain . An example of how I turn qualitative research into frameworks and digital tools that support clearer communication.
Read articlesLanguage notes & essays
Shorter reflections from linguistics, intercultural communication, and everyday life. These pieces sit alongside the more formal research dossiers and trace how I think about language in use, across cultures, and in lived experience.
Language & culture
Essays and cheatsheets on pragmatics, code-switching, localisation, and the small cultural assumptions that make communication work — or fall apart.
Language & meaning
Pieces that look at how meaning is construed in language: how we encode emotion, stance, and self in the way we speak and write.
Language & life
Short narrative pieces and studio notes from everyday life: family stories, classroom moments, and tiny interactions that show how language shapes experience.
What I do
I build the language layer of products and datasets: modelling meaning, shaping annotation and evaluation pipelines, and turning qualitative research into explainable tools in English and Spanish.
I blend linguistic theory with applied systems design so that models, interfaces, and workflows reflect how people actually communicate.
If you need someone to design the language layer of your product, dataset, or research, let’s talk .
Applied meaning modelling
I turn how people describe and evaluate experiences into structured models for explainable tools.
Annotation & evaluation (EN/ES)
I design tags, guidelines, prompts, and QA checks for multilingual speech and text that capture how people interpret meaning.
Linguistics for digital systems
I translate linguistic insight into taxonomies, content structures, and explainable components for digital systems.
Research → application pipelines
I turn qualitative research into taxonomies, clear reports, and early prototypes for better clinical and digital communication.
Portfolio
A tool that turns patients' metaphors and descriptions of pain into structured summaries for analysis and clinical communication of endometriosis pain.
A corpus and analytical framework used to study pain descriptions, metaphor patterns, and how communication shapes diagnosis.
Freelance annotation and evaluation work across speech and text, grounded in linguistic meaning and quality-focused review.
Story
I trained as a linguist in Argentina and the UK, completing a PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University. I then spent 17 years as a lecturer and researcher in UK universities, working on evaluation, metaphor, and how people use language to express experience — especially pain, emotion, and attitude across interviews, forums, and clinical or professional encounters.
Over time, my focus shifted from analysing texts to asking how those insights could live inside tools: how a taxonomy of metaphors might support clinical conversations, how annotation schemes and guidelines could improve the quality of language datasets.
Today, I work at the intersection of linguistics, annotation, and NLP. I design frameworks that respect the nuance of language while making it possible to connect human narratives with structured, interpretable data for products, research, and AI systems.
Publications & media
A concise selection of research and media pieces that inform my applied linguistic work, from pain communication to meaning modelling and discourse analysis.