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.

Shikhar Bharadwaj is a second year PhD student in ChangeLing Lab. His interests are speech processing and learning world knowledge from speech. He is currently involved in building phonetic foundation models.

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.

👩‍💻 Keer Xu is a second year graduate student at CMU SCS MIIS (Master of Science in Intelligent Information Systems) program.

📑 She mainly focus on Natural Language Processing and computational linguistics.

✍️ Her previous researches involve AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation) and UMR (Universal Meaning Representation) annotation, and C-STS (Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity).

As a BS CS and MLT student at CMU, Kalvin Chang worked with David on automating comparative reconstruction. After a year at Amazon, he joined WAVLab and ChangeLing Lab as a Visiting Scholar, working on speech technologies for related varieties of languages (sometimes called “dialects”) and universal phone recognition. He is currently a PhD student at Berkeley NLP, collaborating with ChangeLing Lab on test-time adaptation of speech models to non-standard language varieties.

Eunjung Yeo is a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. She 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.

Kwanghee Choi is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Prof. David Harwath. During his Master’s in Language Technologies at CMU (2023–2025), he was co-advised by Prof. David Mortensen and Prof. Shinji Watanabe. His research lies at the intersection of speech technologies, machine learning, and computational linguistics, with downstream applications such as technologies for atypical speech or universal phone recognition.

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