For our first faculty spotlight this semester, we are highlighting our newest faculty member, Sarah Moeller! Sarah comes to us from (most recently) Colorado where she completed her PhD this past May at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation applied machine learning to nine language documentation corpora and discovered that morphological analysis can be done automatically in new languages even when the necessary training data is very limited and of poor quality.
Read below to learn more about Sarah!
What is your current research focusing on?
The next phase of my morphological research is integrating a human-in-the-loop cycle into the process of automated linguistic analysis and annotation. I’m asking questions like: Can uniquely linguistic knowledge improve machine learning models, particularly when annotated data is limited? How fast can we improve models with humans in the loop of machine predictions? What points in the process benefit most significantly from human knowledge? And how does this all interact with the quality of data and the typology of a language?
How did you first become interested in your research interests?
Growing up overseas made me interested in diverse cultures and languages…that led to teaching English and Russian…which introduced me to linguistics…which opened my eyes to language documentation…. In the meantime, Russian fluency provided a job in defense-funded computational linguistics projects…which got me asking new questions about computer’s place in linguistic fieldwork…. One day, I found myself doing both computer science and linguistics!
What is the most meaningful part of teaching for you?
I remembered discussing favorite professors classmates in my master’s program at Dallas International University. Two professors were complete opposites in personality. We wondered, “How can they be so different and yet both such excellent teachers?” We finally concluded that they had two things in common: a passion for their subject and a passion for their students’ success in academia AND in life. Those professors are still my role models.
What do you wish you’d known when you got started in academia?
How hard the academic job market is right now! 🙂 Seriously, I wish I had known I could be more successful than I thought I could. I can thank my advisors for going further than I thought possible.
Is there any new research development in your field that you’re excited by (articles, the work of specific researchers, topics, etc.)?
I’m excited how quickly interest in endangered languages is growing among computational linguists. When I started my PhD in 2016 I could barely find a handful of researchers engaged in this interdisciplinary topic. Just recently the Association for Computational Linguistics announced the theme of their 2022 conference as “Language Diversity: from Low-Resource to Endangered Languages”! But I am also concerned that the computer computational side of this research area has not had time to develop best practices and ethical standards for working with minority communities. We need more dialogue with linguistic fieldworkers!
What do you enjoy outside of academia?
A good cup of boba tea and a walk with a friend. Trying new foods. Also, just about anything outdoors: hiking, biking, backpacking, swimming, tubing, etc. I gave away my skis and snowshoes when I left Colorado but I have fondly held onto my ice skates. If you find me a rink, I’ll give you a free lesson!