David R. Mortensen
Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
5407 Gates Hillman Complex
Language Technologies Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
I am a computational linguist interested in phonology, morphology, language change, linguistic typology, and human-in-the-loop computation. I am currently an Assistant Research Professor in the Language Technologies Institute, which is part of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. Before coming to CMU, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh.
I did my graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, where I recieved a PhD in Linguistics for a thesis on theoretical phonology. At the same time, I was working on various computational projects relating to language documentation and comparative reconstruction. My current position allows me to bring my various interests together. My research has two strands: uncovering how linguistic knowledge (especially of phonology and morphology) can contribute to natural language processing and using computational models to uncover linguistic knowledge and investigate linguistic hypotheses.
I am currently developing a course on computational models of language below the level of the word.
For more about me, see my curriculum vitae.
I lead ChangeLing Lab, a growing lab dedicated to language change and empirical linguistics.
news
Aug 14, 2024 | Congratuations to Liang (Leon) Lu for winning the ACL2024 Best Paper Award (Non-Publicized) with his paper “Self-Supervised Neural Protolanguage Reconstruction” (joint work with Peirong Xie and myself). |
Aug 9, 2024 | Talk at the University of Bern on August 14, 2024. |
May 16, 2024 | Taiqi He’s paper “Wav2Gloss: Generating Interlinear Glossed Text from Speech” (joing work with Kwanghee Choi, Lindia TjuaTja, Nathaniel Romney Robinson, Jiatong Shi, Shinji Watanabe, Graham Neubig, myself, and Lori Levin) has been accepted for presentation and ACL 2024 (main conference). |
May 16, 2024 | My undergraduate research assistant Leon Liu’s paper “Semisupervised Neural Proto-Language Reconstruction” (joint work with Peirong Xie and me) was accepted to ACL 2024 (main conference). |
Mar 13, 2024 | My PhD student Brendon Boldt’s paper “ XferBench: a Data-Driven Benchmark for Emergent Language” was accepted to NAACL 2024. |