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 Top End Language Lab for research in technology and design for language revitalization.​

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

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• "We are reconciliators": When Indigenous tourism begins with agency
  ​Nikki Curtin and Steven Bird, Journal of Sustainable Tourism. To appear
• Sparse transcription
  Computational Linguistics 46, 2020
• Decolonising speech and language technology
  Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2020
• Interactive word 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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