Natural Language Processing for under-resourced languages - primarily Medieval French - and how large language models trained on various semantic features can be deployed to study the evolution of scientific, anatomical and medical terminology in texts written between the 12th and 15th centuries.

Since 08/2023 - Doctoral Candidate in Computational Linguistics and Digital Humanities, Heidelberg University

Master of Arts in Data and Discourse Studies, TU Darmstadt

Master of Arts in English Literature, King's College London (United Kingdom)

Bachelor's in Corporate Economics, Women's Christian College, University of Madras (India)

Academic Experience

October 2024 - present: External Lecturer, Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, TU Darmstadt

December 2022 - present: Research Assistant, Computational Linguistics and Software Development, ALMA - Heidelberg Academy

October 2021 - March 2022: Student Tutor, Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, TU Darmstadt

December 2020 - February 2021: Student Assistant, Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, TU Darmstadt

Industry Experience

April 2021 - July 2022: Working Student, Marketing and Communications, Telespazio Germany (Darmstadt, Germany)

December 2019 - October 2020: Assistant Manager, Branding and Public Relations, Great Lakes Institute of Management (Chennai, India)

October 2018 - November 2019: Account Executive - Client Servicing and Public Relations, Hill + Knowlton Strategies (Chennai, India)

March 2017 - April 2018: Junior Account Executive - Public Relations, Avian WE (Chennai, India)

Menon, Ragini and Sabine Tittel, "From Vernacular to Vocabulary: Developing an LLM for Medieval French with HeidelBERT", in: International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 2026 (accepted paper).

Menon, Ragini and Sabine Tittel, "ALMeD - An Annotated Corpus for Old and Middle French", in: Historical Languages and AI International Conference, March 5-6, 2026, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, organised by the Daidalos Project (accepted short paper).

Posillipo, Yasmine, Matthias Schöffel, Ragini Menon, Sabine Tittel, and Maria Selig, "Exploring Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Medieval Medical Texts: Addressing Diachronic Challenges in Old Italian Using French, Occitan, and Spanish", in: Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics and Cultural Analytics: Data-Driven Insights into Language and Cultural Change, King's College London, January 2026 (accepted paper).

Menon, Ragini, "HeidelBERT: A Large Language Model for Tracing the Evolution of Medieval French", in: Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists (in print).

Pethő, Gergely, Ragini Menon, Matthias Schöffel, Sabine Tittel, "Comparing the Ability of Generative Language Models to Understand Medieval Languages" [in Print]

Winter Semester 2025/2026, "Annotating Discourse in Medieval European Knowledge Networks", Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, TU Darmstadt

Summer Semester 2025, "Preprocessing with Python", Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, TU Darmstadt

Winter Semester 2024/2025, "Annotating Discourse in Medieval European Knowledge Networks", Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, TU Darmstadt