Will Styler

Will Styler received his Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Although making the joy, pain, and wonder of language available to students of all levels is his primary focus as a teaching professor, Will's research focuses on computational approaches to linguistics, specifically in acoustic phonetics, speech perception, and natural language processing. Will uses computer modeling, signal processing, and machine learning to model how humans produce, perceive, and understand language, generating testable hypotheses with computers and following up with human listeners. His main focus in speech has been on the perception of vowel quality and vowel nasality in the face of limited context and high variability. In natural language processing, his primary focus is in knowledge representation and extraction in jargon-heavy domains (e.g. medical or intelligence reports), where shared background knowledge permits the omission of huge amounts of information. His work has been published in Language, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the Journal of Phonetics, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and the Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics.