About me

I am a PhD candidate in the Natural Language Processing lab at the University of Tartu, supervised by Prof. Mark Fishel, with my dissertation completed and pending defense.

My research focused on learning under data scarcity, with an emphasis on cross-lingual knowledge transfer for low-resource languages. I studied how synthetic and native data can be leveraged at different stages of model training, through continued pre-training, fine-tuning and prompting, to improve language understanding in settings where high-quality data is limited. I contributed to the development of Llammas 🐑.

In addition that, my work also addressed practical challenges of model evaluation in low-resource settings, including the use of translated and synthetic datasets, and resulted in the development of a new evaluation benchmark for low-resource Finno-Ugric languages.

Alongside my PhD research, I have experience applying NLP in industry settings. I have worked as a data scientist and software developer, including an internship at STACC where I focused on detecting adverse drug reactions from clinical text, which formed my Master’s thesis.

My current research interests span language-robust representations, reliable language modeling, and learning beyond static training setups such as continual learning.

I am open to postdoctoral and industry research roles.

News

06/05/2025	Launched baromeeter.ai - a collaborative Estonian chatbot evaluation platform.
03/05/2025	Presented at NAACL 2025. [poster]
03/03/2025	Presented at NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025. [slides]
23/01/2025	LLMs for Extremely Low-Resource Finno-Ugric Languages was accepted at NAACL 2025 Findings.

Publications

Hele-Andra Kuulmets, Taido Purason, Mark Fišel. 2025. How Well do LLMs know Finno-Ugric Languages? A Systematic Assessment. In Proceedings of NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025. [anthology]
Taido Purason^†, Hele-Andra Kuulmets^†, Mark Fišel. 2024. LLMs for Extremely Low-Resource Finno-Ugric Languages. In Findings of NAACL 2025. [arXiv] [anthology]
Hele-Andra Kuulmets^†, Taido Purason^†, Agnes Luhtaru, Mark Fišel. 2024. Teaching Llama a New Language Through Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer. In Findings of NAACL 2024. [arXiv] [anthology]
Hele-Andra Kuulmets and Mark Fišel. 2023. Translated Benchmarks Can Be Misleading: the Case of Estonian Question Answering. In Proceedings of NoDaLiDa 2023. [anthology]
Hele-Andra Kuulmets, Andre Tättar, Mark Fišel. 2022. Estonian Language Understanding: a Case Study on the COPA Task. In Baltic Journal of Modern Computing. [pdf]

_{^† Equal contribution}