I am conducting social and technological experiments in the future evolution of the world's languages. I am collaborating with speech communities in diasporas and ancestral homelands to design new approaches to language maintenance and revitalisation, including storytelling and mobile-assisted oral language learning.

I studied computer science at the University of Melbourne before completing a PhD in computational linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. I have conducted fieldwork on endangered languages in West Africa, Central Asia, Amazonia, Melanesia, and Australia. I've held academic positions at the Universities of Edinburgh, Pennsylvania, Melbourne, and UC Berkeley.

I am recruiting PhD students to the Oral Language Technology group for research in technology and design for language revitalization (more).

• Interview on ABC Radio National (October 2017)
• TEDxDarwin Talk (August 2016)

Karakoram Highway, Xinjiang, China

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Projects

• Storytelling for International Year of Indigenous Languages
• Language Parties
• Untranslatable​
• ​Kunwok language learning
• Aikuma App for language recording [GitHub]
• Natural Language Toolkit [GitHub]
• Open Language Archives Community [GitHub]
• Toney: Software for Tone Languages [GitHub]
• Edgy: Build Your Own Graph Algorithms [GitHub]

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Recent
​Publications

• Sparse Transcription
  Computational Linguistics 46(4), 2020
  
• Decolonising Speech and Language Technology
  Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2020
• Morph Completion for Morphologically Rich Languages
  William Lane and Steven Bird, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2020
• Enabling Interactive Transcription in an Indigenous Community
  Éric Le Ferrand, Steven Bird, and Laurent Besacier, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2020
  
• Bootstrapping Techniques for Polysynthetic Morphological Analysis
  William Lane and Steven Bird, Proceedings of the ACL, 2020
• Image-Gesture-Voice: A Web Component for Eliciting Speech
  Mat Bettinson and Steven Bird. Workshop on Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages, 2018
• Creating a World that Sustains its Languages
  In Seyalioglu and Hymes (eds), Dialect – A Game about Language and How it Dies, 2018
• Designing Mobile Applications for Documenting Endangered Languages
  ​Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, 2018
• More publications: Google Scholar | ACL Anthology | DBLP | ResearchGate

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Past Students

• Trevor Cohn, Phil Blunsom, Catherine Lai, Oliver Adams, Florian Hanke, Clint Burfoot, Patrick Ye, Long Duong, Mat Bettinson, Sumukh Ghodke
  
  

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Books

• Natural Language Processing with Python (O'Reilly Media, 2009)
• Yémba-English Dictionary (SIL Cameroon, 1997)
• Computational Phonology: A Constraint-Based Approach (Cambridge, 1995)

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