Prof. Sharon Goldwater, Ph.D.

Sharon Goldwater is Professor at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation of the University of Edinburgh.

Her research interests include unsupervised and minimally-supervised learning for speech and language processing, computer modelling of language acquisition in children, and computational studies of language use. Her main focus within linguistics has been on the lower levels of structure including phonetics, phonology, and morphology. Historically she worked mainly with probabilistic (especially Bayesian) models, which are useful for exploring the kinds of structures and constraints that are needed to support linguistic generalizations. More recently she works with neural network models, and models combining NN and Bayesian aspects.

In her research, she aims to discover the computational processes and constraints that are needed to learn linguistic structure, either in humans or in machines.

She is a Visiting Fellow at CAS in May and June 2024 upon the invitation of Prof. Dr. James Kirby (CAS Young Center/LMU).