Darinka Verdonik, PhD is a professor of Slovene and works as a researcher in the field of language technologies, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. She received her PhD in 2006. Since 2007, she has been habilitated for the subject area of ​​Slovene and is an external associate at the postgraduate doctoral study of the 3rd level at the Department of Slavic Languages ​​and Literature at the Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor. She is a member of the Digital Signal Processing Laboratory. She is scientifically active in interdisciplinary fields dealing with speech communication issues, whether from the point of view of speech technologies, the construction of language resources, corpus linguistic studies of speech, or the discourse and pragmatic aspects of speech communication. She was the leader of the project of creating a concordance for the Slovenian Speech Corps, a contributor to various linguistic projects (construction of speech bases, formological and phonetic lexicons and corpora) and an active member of the Advanced Methods of Interaction in Telecommunications Research Group.