linguist, polyglot, data scientist

My love for linguistics stems from a love of discovering patterns in how people use spoken and written language in context. In my academic work, I've sought explanations for why such patterns exist and how they might develop over time. In my professional career, I have applied my background in corpus and experimental linguistics to identify and fix bugs and gaps in spoken language understanding models that underlie a virtual assistant (Alexa).

In general, I ask: What linguistic structures do people have at their disposal, and how do they use them for particular communicative purposes in particular pragmatic contexts? I have sought explanations that are based in communicative function, general cognitive principles and historical development.

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One main area of my main research has looked at probabilistic case marking, in which speakers appear to have the "option" of using case markers that contain semantic and syntactic information under certain pragmatic conditions. Another key area of my research has examined how speakers of tone languages use pitch for conveying both lexical and (more context-dependent) intonational information.

To answer these questions, I have taken an interdisciplinary approach that uses a mix of traditional linguistic field methods and quantitative methods, including experimental and corpus-based approaches. I have worked mainly with primary data that I have collected through fieldwork conducted in India and Nepal or through collaborations with colleagues. My publications include work in acoustic phonetics, speech perception and grammatical descriptions of aspects of under-described languages.

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