معرفی
Sharon Goldwater is a Professor in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. Her research focuses on computational models of language acquisition, particularly in unsupervised learning of linguistic structure, Bayesian and neural network models, and cross-linguistic studies. She is affiliated with the Edinburgh NLP group and the Centre for Doctoral Training in Responsible NLP (CDT).
Education & Background: PhD from Brown University (2007), postdoctoral research at Stanford University, and extensive academic roles including program chair for EACL 2014 and governance roles in the field.
Research Interests: Speech perception, phonetics, morphology, and the integration of computational models with cognitive science. She explores how humans and machines learn language structures from limited data, with applications to zero-resource languages and sociolinguistic analysis.
Key Contributions: Pioneered Bayesian models for word segmentation, developed self-supervised speech representations, and contributed to understanding phonetic learning dynamics. Recognized with awards like the 2016 Roger Needham Award and multiple paper prizes.
Grants & Awards: Includes the 2024 Outstanding Paper Award, 2021 Best Research Paper award, and leadership in academic service. Her work bridges theoretical linguistics, machine learning, and cognitive science.
Labs & Teams: Active in the Edinburgh NLP group and CDT, fostering collaborative research on NLP ethics and computational linguistics. Her lab's work spans from foundational algorithms to applied sociolinguistic studies using computational methods.
