Austin Jones

I'm a PhD Candidate studying the intersection of corpus phonetics, machine learning, and phonology. At heart, I'm an acoustic phonetician with an interest in improving our models of speech production. Through study of social and linguistic variables, we can identify stable patterns of variation relevant to computational goals like statistical modeling, automatic speech recognition, and the creation of linguistic corpora. However, these patterns of variation prove difficult to capture at scale when the computational tools used are inflexible or unavailable like in a low-resource language context. My research concerns ways in which machine learning can aid in the detection of variation in order to capture phonetic and phonological patterns.