Steven Bird
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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)
Picture
Karakoram Highway, Xinjiang, China

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]

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

Past Students

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


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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