ChangeLing Lab

Language Change and Empirical Linguistics at CMU

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5407 Gates Hillman Complex

Language Technologies Institute

Carnegie Mellon University

ChangeLing Lab is Carnegie Mellon University’s only research lab focused on understanding how languages change, and how these patterns of change shape the way that languages are at any given point in time, from a computational perspective. We are interested in phonetics, phonology, and morphology (whether diachronic or synchronic), emergent communication, and have a special concern for the use of language science to benefit people with disabilities.

ChangeLing is lead by David R. Mortensen, an Assistant Research Professor in the Language Technologies Institute. It consists, additionally, of graduate students, former LTI students who still collaborate with David, and visitors.

If you are interested in joining ChangeLing, please email David at dmortens@cs.cmu.edu with a CV and a description of what work you would like to do with us. Please take the following into account:

  • We are only concerned with work that has some linguistic angle (either it uses linguistics or it is useful for linguists). Students who are concerned with machine learning for its own sake would be better served by another lab.
  • We are interested in large language models, but only with respect to their language and linguistic reasoning capabilities. Our lab is not a good place to do general, engineering-focused or fundamental research on LLMs.

news

Sep 10, 2024 Congratulations to Kalvin Chang and David Mortensen for winning an Honorable Mention, Best Paper Award at the Interspeech 2024 Responsible Speech Foundation Models Special Session with their paper “Self-supervised Speech Representations Still Struggle with African American Vernacular English” (joint work with Yi-Hui Chou, Hsuan-Ming Chen, Jiatong Shi, Nicole Holliday, and Odette Scharenborg).
Sep 06, 2024 David Mortensen gave a CLSP Seminar at Johns Hopkins University.
Aug 14, 2024 Congratulations to Liang (Leon) Lu for winning the ACL2024 Best Paper Award (Non-Publicized) with his paper “Self-Supervised Neural Protolanguage Reconstruction” (joint work with Peirong Xie and David Mortensen).
Aug 07, 2024 :sparkles: ChangeLing Lab is officially born! :sparkles: (though it has long existed in fact).

latest posts

selected publications