Zara Maxwell-Smith

Zara Maxwell-Smith is a Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), UNSW Canberra. She earned her doctorate from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2024, where she also taught from 2013 to 2023. Her professional experience spans multiple universities, schools, and government research roles. Zara holds a Graduate Diploma in Teaching and a Bachelor’s degree (details partially obscured).

Her

• Doctorate: ANU, 2024
• Graduate Diploma in Teaching
• Bachelor’s degree (field unspecified)

Zara’s research focuses on leveraging computational methods for Indonesian language education. She explores

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) in bilingual teaching contexts
• Corpus linguistics for curriculum design
• Speech recognition technologies for low-resource languages
• Cultural representation in language pedagogy
• Policy implications for language education

Her publications emphasize technological innovation in language teaching, including speech recognition systems for YouTube-based lessons, fine-tuned language models, and the OIL corpus. These works highlight trends in

• Code-switching analysis in Indonesian-English contexts
• Transfer learning applications for ASR
• Curriculum development using computational tools
• Documenting language usage patterns

Zara collaborates with institutions like the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) and has contributed to initiatives such as the Transcription Acceleration Project (TAP). She has developed open-source language models and educational datasets aimed at improving accessibility for Indonesian learners.