Richard Sproat is a

computational linguist Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

currently working for Sakana AI as a research scientist. Prior to joining Sakana AI, Sproat worked for

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

between 2012 and 2024 on

text normalization Text normalization is the process of transforming text into a single canonical form that it might not have had before. Normalizing text before storing or processing it allows for separation of concerns, since input is guaranteed to be consisten ...

and

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

Linguistics

Sproat graduated from

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in 1985, under the supervision of Kenneth L. Hale. His PhD thesis is one of the earliest work that derives morphosyntactically complex forms from the module which produces the phonological form that realizes these morpho-syntactic expressions, one of the core ideas in

Distributed Morphology In generative linguistics, Distributed Morphology is a theoretical framework introduced in 1993 by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz.Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz. 1993. 'Distributed Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection.' In The View from Buildin ...

. One of Sproat's main contributions to computational linguistics is in the field of text normalization, where his work with colleagues in 2001, ''Normalization of non-standard words'', was considered a seminal work in formalizing this component of

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...

systems. He has also worked on computational morphology and the computational analysis of writing systems.

External links

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References

Google people Living people MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni Year of birth missing (living people) {{linguist-stub