About Me
I am a Ph.D. linguistics student at the CUNY Graduate Center who specializes in writing systems and computational linguistics. My research focuses on how writing encodes language and how we can formally distinguish language from noise.
This website showcases my academic work, projects, and research assistance services.
Research Assistance Services
I provide technical support for research projects, including but not limited to:
- Data Scraping: Extracting structured and unstructured data from online and digital sources.
- Data Analysis: Using Python or R for data processing, modeling, and statistical analysis.
- Data Visualization: Designing clear visualizations for datasets.
If you need technical support for your research, I offer a free consultation. Visit my Services page for details.
Education
- M.A. Linguistic Theory & Typology, University of Kentucky (2024)
- B.A. Philosophy, Western Kentucky University (2018)
Research Interests
My research centers on understanding how writing systems encode linguistic information. I approach this from a computational perspective, bringing together information theory, computational linguistics, and historical linguistics, building on work such as (Coulmas, 1989, 2003) and (Sproat, 2000).
I treat writing as a proper object of linguistic investigation, not just a secondary representation of speech. A simple question motivates much of my work:
Given two texts, each composed of strings of symbols in an unknown script, one encoding natural language and the other generated by a random process, how can we determine which text encodes language and which does not?
More broadly, I am interested in what formal, quantifiable properties distinguish genuine linguistic signal from stochastic noise that appears linguistic on the surface. Addressing this question requires a general theory of language, including syntactic dependencies, cross-linguistic phonological patterns, and the constraints that separate possible human languages from impossible ones. It also demands engagement with competing theoretical accounts of what counts as “language.”
At its core, my research asks what language is, using writing systems as a testbed for linguistic theories and methods that aim to distinguish language from non-language.
1. Writing Systems
I investigate how writing systems encode phonology and morphology, what cross-linguistic constraints shape their design, and how script properties influence cognition. Recent work includes information-theoretic studies of efficiency and redundancy in alphabetic and syllabic systems and work on detecting script directionality.
2. Computational Phonology
I use computational methods to model sub-word patterns in writing and to formalize the boundary between linguistic structure and noise, applying information-theoretic measures to quantify and recover linguistic properties from script features. I am also interested in formal phonology, especially logical approaches that characterize the complexity of phonological grammars and link phonological constraints to their computational class.
3. Corpus Linguistics
I study orthographic patterns and linguistic variation across scripts and time using multilingual and diachronic corpora. This work ranges from quantifying spelling and sub-word regularities to tracing the historical evolution of writing systems.
Selected Presentations
| Year | Title | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Predicting the Direction of Writing Using Character Gram Sequences | 16th Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society (ILLS16) |
| 2024 | Data Degradation in the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States | American Dialect Society |
| 2023 | Investigating the Etymology of ‘Bogle’ - A Dialectological Approach | American Dialect Society |
| 2023 | Deciphering Historical Texts Using Word Embeddings | Central Kentucky Linguistics Conference |
| 2022 | Logography? More like NOgography: Reconsidering Writing System Typologies | Central Kentucky Linguistics Conference |
| 2015 | Critique of Zimmerman’s Philosophy of Time | Kentucky Philosophical Association |
| 2014 | Syntactic Analysis of Elision: ‘Want to/Wanna’ | Western Kentucky University Undergraduate Conference |
Affiliations
Linguistic Atlas Project
University of Kentucky
A comprehensive study documenting linguistic variation in American English dialects since 1929. The project includes digitization of over 90 years of linguistic data to make it accessible for modern research. Learn More
DECRYPT Project
Stockholm University
An interdisciplinary initiative focused on decrypting historical manuscripts. Combining computational linguistics, cryptology, and philology, the project develops tools for analyzing and making historical ciphers accessible. Learn More
