Biography

I’m Chadi [ˈʃɛdi; SHE-dee], a postdoctoral researcher at the Université de Neuchâtel. I grew up in باجة (Beja), Tunisia, and moved at an early age to Paris, where I began my path into linguistics research.

I am a linguist working at the intersection of corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. My research investigates a range of cognitive, structural, and sociocultural questions, with a particular focus on methods for the quantitative analysis of low-resource languages and imbalanced or sample-biased datasets. I am also interested in the discovery and analysis of formulaic language and multiword expressions (MWEs). My current postdoctoral work centers on corpus-based approaches to the inductive analysis of connectivity changes within networks of constructions.

I hold a BA in English Philology (linguistics, literature, culture, and civilization) and an MA in Linguistics from Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis. I obtained my PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in December 2024.

Scientific Activity

• Detecting connectivity changes inductively in a network of constructions
• Building a Norwegian ConstructiCon through a corpus driven approach
• mMERGE: a corpus driven Multiword Expressions discovery algorithm
• Quantitative Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the radical/far right discursive strategies

Publications

Ben Youssef, C., & de la Fuente, A. (2026). ‘I wear combat boots on my tongue’: a random forest analysis of stance taking and evaluation in the radical-right media. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science. https://doi.org/10.3138/jrds-2025-000

Ben Youssef, C. (2024). mMERGE: A corpus-driven multiword expressions discovery algorithm (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. (Publication No. 31763846)

Ben Youssef, C., & Gries, S. Th. (2023). Code-switching in Tunisian Arabic: a multifactorial random forest analysis. Corpora, 18(3). https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2023.0289

Todd, S., Ben Youssef, C., & Vasquez, A. (2023). Language structure, attitudes, and learning from ambient exposure: Lex- ical and phonotactic knowledge of Spanish among non-Spanish-speaking Californians and Texans. PLoS ONE, 18(4). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284919

Willis, C., & Ben Youssef, C. (2023). Random bisexual forests: Intersections between gender, sexuality, and race in /s/ pro- duction. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 8(1): 5004. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5504