people

David R. Mortensen is a computational linguist specializing in phonology, morphology, and language change and is Assistant Research Professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the head of ChangeLing Lab.

Brendon Boldt is an 3rd year PhD student in ChangLing Lab. He works primarily on emergent language/emergent communication and is about to propose a thesis about it.

Kwanghee Choi is a second-year Master’s student in the LTI and is a member of both WAVLab and ChangeLing Lab. He focuses on the interpretability of self-supervised speech models from the viewpoint of linguistics and information theory, with downstream applications such as discrete ASR or dysarthric speech assessment.

Leon (or Liang) Lu is an undergraduate in computer science at CMU. He has diverse interests. As part of ChangeLing Lab, he has worked on automating linguists’ “comparative method” for reconstructing proto-languages given sets of cognate reflexes.

Chin-Jou Li is a 1st master’s student in the LTI. She currently works on atypical speech assessment and universal phone recognition.

Kalvin Chang worked with David while he was an undergraduate and master’s student at CMU, where he worked on automating comparative reconstruction and computational phonology. After a year at Amazon, he has joined WAVLab and ChangeLing Lab as a visitor during Fall 2024. Kalvin currently works on speech technologies for related varieties of languages (sometimes called “dialects”) and universal phone recognition.

Eunjung Yeo recently completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at Seoul National University and has joined the ChangeLing Lab as a visitor in 2024. Her research has focused on the application of technologies for atypical speech, including dysarthric and nonnative speech, from the perspectives of phonetics and phonology.

Haeji Jung earned her Master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Korea University and is visiting ChangeLing Lab during 2024-2025. She has been working on representation learning and is currently interested in leveraging phonological representations for multilingual language modeling and other NLP applications.

Ting Chen is an undergraduate in Statistics and Machine Learning at CMU. Her interests are in natural speech processing in low resource languages. She has been working in automatic speech recognition in Sinitic dialects, as well as phylogenetic inference in historical linguistics.

Leonie Weissweiler recently received her PhD from LMU Munich and is now a postdoc with Kyle Mahowald at UT Austin. She collaborates with ChangeLing Lab on topics related to the linguistic evaluation of language models, for example for constructions or morphological generalization.

Alumni

• Maria Ryskina (PhD) → MIT
• Katherine J. Zhang (MA GCAT) → HoYoverse
• Nathan Anderson (MLT) → BYU
• Xinyu Zhang (MLT)
• Chenxuan Cui (MIIS) → NVIDIA
• Youngmin Kim (MIIS) → Meta
• Nate Robinson (MLT) → JHU
• Yanlin Feng (MLT) → Megagon
• Anna Cai (MSML) → Meta