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Alumni
Recent Alumni News
Dr. Kirby Conrod started their linguistics journey via a double major in Linguistics and Literature for their BA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they discovered a deep love of syntax. After spending time teaching English in Taiwan, they then moved to Seattle, Washington to pursue their PhD in Linguistics at the University of Washington, where they specialized in syntax and sociolinguistics, advised by Professors Citko and Wassink. Their 2019 dissertation, … Read more
In 2022-2023 the department awarded 53 Bachelor of Arts degrees, 42 Master of Science degrees and 1 Doctor of Philosophy degree. Congratulations to all of our graduates! We were delighted to celebrate your successes during our June commencement ceremony.
We were also delighted to welcome back Chia-Hui Huang (2003 PhD) as our commencement speaker. Chia-Hui distinguished herself both in academia, during her time at the University of Washington and the University of… Read more
In June 2022 Nathan Loggins received his PhD in Linguistics, filing his dissertation entitled Ethnic History and Language Typology in Western China: The Cases of Xining, Daohua and Bai.
The goal of Nathan’s dissertation was to trace language development along the lines of social history in three multilingual regions across China’s historical frontier with Tibet: Amdo on the modern Qinghai-Gansu border, the Kham region of western Sichuan, and Dali in Yunnan.… Read more
2021 PhD Amandalynne Paullada was interviewed on 7-27-22 by Kirsten Martin of Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center concerning her article "Machine Translation Shifts Power", which was published in 2021 in The Gradient while she was still a PhD student.
In the article and the interview, Paullada gives examples of how grave misunderstandings can result from the crudeness of machine… Read more
The department was delighted to welcome 2019 PhD Brent Woo back to UW as this year’s (June 2022) commencement speaker.
The introduction by Woo’s advisor, Barbara Citko, detailed his many accomplishments at UW. For those of us who remember Woo as a great citizen of the department, it’s no surprise that he has been an active participant in the Linguistic Society of America, featured on the… Read more
Betsy Evans, (Associate Professor, UW Department of Linguistics), Russell Hugo (2016 PhD; Assistant Director, UW Language Learning Center), and Alex Panicacci (Postdoctoral Fellow, UW Department of Psychology), some of the members of the Linguistic Bias Working Group, presented on ‘Language as Part of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda’ on May 13, 2022, as part of a colloquium on… Read more
In December 2021 Ben Jones successfully defended and filed his dissertation, The Spatiality of Perceptual Dialectology, supervised by Betsy Evans.
Jones’ dissertation focused on language attitudes and ideologies towards English in the state of Maine. Respondents in Jones’ study were asked to use the Folk Linguistic Online Mapping tool developed by Betsy Evans to draw regions of Maine… Read more
In December 2021 Ajda Gokçen successfully defended and filed her dissertation, Resourceful at Any Size: A Predictive Methodology Using Linguistic Corpus Metrics for Multi-Source Training in Neural Dependency Parsing, supervised by Gina-Anne Levow.
Multilingual modeling comes up in natural language processing at any scale. Corpora for high-resource languages (like English) train high-performing models, and can be combined with other language corpora of all sizes to make better… Read more
In December 2021 Amandalynne Paullada successfully defended and filed her dissertation, Considerations for the social impact of natural language processing, supervised by Fei Xia.
Natural language processing (NLP) technologies have transformed how people access information and communicate with one another. Particularly as these technologies have come to rely on large amounts of personal data and are deployed in a variety of sensitive contexts, it has… Read more
As previously reported, in July 2021 we mourned the loss of beloved PhD student and undergraduate advisor, Jiahui Huang. The Jiahui Huang Memorial Fund was established shortly after his passing to support the installation of the Jiahui Huang Memorial Bench outside the entrance of Guggenheim Hall.… Read more