Janet Pierrehumbert

Title: Natural language processsing versus the heterogenous world of natural language

Bio: I am the Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre, which is part of the Dept. of Engineering Science. I have been doing interdisciplinary research in experimental and computational linguistics throughout my career. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I studied linguistics and mathematics. My Ph.D thesis from MIT developed a model of English prosody and intonation. Much of the research was carried out in the Linguistics and AI Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories, where I also served as a Member of Technical Staff. I then joined the Linguistics faculty at Northwestern University, where I served terms as department chair and director of graduate studies. I moved to Oxford in May, 2015. I have a courtesy appointment at Oxford in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, and I am an Associate Member of the Oxford Man Institute, and I teach the Introduction to Statistical Natural Language Processing module for Oxford's postgraduate program in Social Data Science. I am one of the founding members of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. I am a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Cognitive Science Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences .   [more information]