I am conducting social and technological experiments in the future evolution of the world's languages. Together with my students and colleagues, I am developing scalable methods for preserving disappearing words and world views for future generations of speakers and scholars. I am collaborating with speech communities in diasporas and ancestral homelands to design new approaches to language maintenance and revitalisation. I'm particularly interested in the question of how to learn an unwritten language without reducing it to writing in the process.

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 currently based in Australia's "Top End", working on the Bininj Kunwok language. I serve on the board of Melaleuca Refugee Centre.

I am recruiting PhD students and a postdoctoral fellow 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
• Treasure Language Storytelling
• 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

• Creating a World that Sustains its Languages
  In Seyalioglu and Hymes (eds, 2018), Dialect – A Game about Language and How it Dies.
• Designing Mobile Applications for Documenting Endangered Languages
  ​In Rehg and Campbell (eds, 2018), Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages
• Expressing Language Resource Metadata as Linked Data (with Gary Simons)
  In Pareja-Lora et al (eds, 2017), Development of Linguistic Linked Open Data Resources for Collaborative Data-Intensive Research in the Language Sciences, MIT Press.
• Phonology (with Jeffrey Heinz)
  In Mitkov (ed, 2018), Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics
• More publications: Google Scholar | ACL Anthology | DBLP | ResearchGate

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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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