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Sara Ng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on computational models of prosody and speech perception, concentrating on how prosody impacts the understanding of spoken language. She investigates how humans utilize tune, rhythm, and pronunciation to convey pragmatic meaning and the effects of discourse structure on information exchange, particularly in contexts involving hearing impairment and speech disorders. Recently, her work has explored commercial speech recognition systems, notably OpenAI's Whisper, emphasizing the integration of prosodic features into these models. Ng employs corpus-based, theory-agnostic engineering approaches to ground her findings in established principles of language acoustics. Her contributions to the field are significant, especially regarding the applied aspects of speech and language technology.
Department of Philosophy