Dragana Špica

Dragana Špica, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia. She received her PhD in Japanese linguistics from Osaka University. Her research and professional work connect linguistics, Japanese studies, foreign language education, translation, and the application of AI in language teaching. She has conducted pioneering research on Japanese phonology in comparison with Croatian, the perception of Japanese vowel length by Croatian listeners, and grammatical voice in Japanese. She is co-author, with Prof. Irena Srdanović, of the scholarly monograph Introduction to Japanese Linguistics: Basic Characteristics, Phonetic System, and Lexical Layers, the first work of its kind in Croatian and closely related South Slavic languages.

In recent years, she has focused on AI-supported linguistic resources, Japanese lexical networks, corpus-based analysis, and the extraction of semantic relations using large language models. Her recent publications and presentations, co-authored with Benedikt Perak, include work on Japanese multi-relation lexical networks, AI-based language-learning resources, Can-Do learning paths, and AI in linguistic research. She is also participating in the Erasmus+ project Integrating Artificial Intelligence for the Digital Transformation of Language Teaching (2026–2029), which advances AI-supported language learning and teaching.

CV updated on 2026-09-15.