Faculty Fellows Silvina Montrul (Spanish and Portuguese, Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) and David Dubin (School of Information Sciences) appeared in NCSA news story for their research in "Analyzing and Visualizing Linguistic Variation in Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers".
About the Project: The majority of human language theories, models, and assessments are based on monolingual and English language data. Acknowledging linguistic diversity as a normal condition of human language is necessary to regard multi-and bilinguals as native speakers. This project proposes using computational resources to build an annotated corpus (with speech samples of Spanish and English speakers in the U.S. and Mexico) to investigate the underutilization of automation tools and encoding standards and improve productivity to lead to new discoveries.