Dr. Will Styler

Biography

Will Styler received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His primary focus as a teaching professor is to make the joys, pains, and wonders of language accessible to students at all levels. His research centers on computational approaches to linguistics, particularly in the fields of acoustic phonetics, speech perception, and natural language processing. Styler employs computer modeling and signal processing, using machine learning techniques to model how humans produce, perceive, and understand language. His work generates testable hypotheses about the interactions between computers and human listeners. A significant emphasis of his research includes examining speech perception, vowel quality, and vowel nasality, especially within contexts of high variability. In the realm of natural language processing, he focuses on knowledge representation and extraction within jargon-heavy domains, such as medical intelligence reports, leveraging shared background knowledge to facilitate the omission of substantial amounts of information. His work has been published in reputable journals, including Language, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Journal of Phonetics, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Research Interests