Sharon Goldwater: Research

Research interests

My primary research interest is in unsupervised learning of linguistic structure, both by humans and by machines. Historically I have worked mainly with probabilistic (especially Bayesian) models, which are useful for exploring the kinds of structures and constraints that are needed to support linguistic generalizations. More recently I have also been working with neural network models, and models combining NN and Bayesian aspects. Areas I am particularly interested in include

• Computational models of early language acquisition in humans (speech perception, phonetics, phonologogy, morphology, and word segmentation).
• Joint learning (of morphology/syntax, phonology/morphology, word segmentation/phonetics, prosody/syntax, syntax/semantics, etc).
• Analysis of the learned representations and behaviour of deep learning models.
• Nonparametric Bayesian models as applied to language.
• Computational approaches to the study of language use and processing, including computational historical and sociolinguistics.

Short biography

Sharon Goldwater is a Professor in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. She received her PhD in 2007 from Brown University and spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University before moving to Edinburgh. Her research interests include unsupervised and minimally-supervised learning for speech and language processing, computer modelling of language acquisition in children, and computational studies of language use. Her main focus within linguistics has been on the lower levels of structure including phonetics, phonology, and morphology.

Prof. Goldwater has received awards including the 2016 Roger Needham Award from the British Computer Society for "distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK-based researcher who has completed up to 10 years of post-doctoral research." She has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Computational Linguistics, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the inaugural board of OPEN MIND: Advances in Cognitive Science. She was a program chair for the 2014 Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) and chaired the EACL governing board from 2019-2020.

Publications, Sharon Goldwater