Expertise

Michael Gasser is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. For 18 years his research was concerned with computational modeling of human language acquisition, relational knowledge, and rhythm processing, especially using neural networks. More recently he has turned his attention to applications of computational linguistics to the democratization of knowledge. The main focus of this work is the building of practical systems that process some of the disadvantaged languages of the Global South and can be applied to tasks such as translation, language teaching, information retrieval, and language revitalization. This work currently concentrates on the major languages of Ethiopia and several indigenous languages of the Americas.

The research that I current do is concerned with developing computational tools for languages of the Global South.

Outside of academia, I'm involved in activism of various sorts, related to ecology, immigration, language rights, and the democratization of science. Email me if you're interested.

Communities
Cognitive Science
Degrees
PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, Applied Linguistics , 1988
MA, University of California, Los Angeles, Teaching English as a Second Language, 1979
BA, San Diego State College, Mathematics, 1969
Keywords
language acquisition computational linguistics phonology lexicography cognitive science cognitive development or processes morphology machine translation knowledge acquisition knowledge representation natural language programming information retrieval
Languages
Amharic, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Tigrigna
Associations
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
Association for Computational Linguistics
Cognitive Science Society