Hello! I’m an Assistant Professor of Computational Language Science in the Department of Linguistics at University of Florida, where I lead the Computational Linguistics Lab.

Before joining UF, I was a 2021-2023 Computing Innovation Fellow supported by the National Science Foundation / Computing Research Association, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at Boston College.

My research program studies variation in languages, machines and their intersections. I address related questions from aspects of language typology, language learning and multilingual NLP, along with a non-western mind. The general methodology that I use is a data-driven approach coupled with The #BenderRule and methods of number counting at varying degrees of carbon dioxide consumption.

Besides academic responsibilities, I proudly serve on the planning committee for Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, and their biennial institute Breath of Life.

My real-life interests are music, food, and simple methods, and in that order too.

Something extra

2020 - 2022

During my postdoc, I worked on developing model evaluation methods and language technology for low-resource multilingual NLP, mentored by Emily Tucker Prud’hommeaux.

2016 - 2020

I did my PhD in Linguistics at University of California, Davis, advised by Kenji Sagae. My dissertation project focused on crosslinguistic modeling of word order preferences. Additionally, this project also tried to adapt theoretical framework of dependency syntax to develop a treebank for Hupa, an endangered Dene language of northwestern California traditionally spoken in Hoopa Valley on the lower Trinity River in present-day Humboldt County, as a way to formalize and model the syntax of indigenous languages.

Besides school I interned as a software developer at the Cognitive Computing Lab at Baidu in Summer 2019. I worked on designing graph represetations for open-domain information extraction in English and Mandarin.

2014 - 2016

Before the PhD, I thought to try for an MA in Linguistics first at UC Davis, advised by Raul Aranovich. My thesis looked at authorship attribution for short text documents.