Richard William Sproat | |
---|---|
Alma mater |
University of California, San Diego (B.A., 1981) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1985) [1] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computational linguistics |
Institutions | Google (2012–present) |
Thesis | On Deriving the Lexicon (1985) |
Doctoral advisor | Ken Hale |
Richard Sproat is a computational linguist currently working for Google as a researcher on text normalization [2] and speech recognition. [1]
Sproat graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, under the supervision of Kenneth L. Hale. [3] His PhD thesis is one of the earliest work that derives morphosyntactically complex forms from the module which produces the phonological form that realizes these morpho-syntactic expressions, one of the core ideas in Distributed Morphology. [4]
One of Sproat's main contributions to computational linguistics is in the field of text normalization, where his work with colleagues in 2001, Normalization of non-standard words, [5] was considered a seminal work in formalizing this component of speech synthesis systems. He has also worked on computational morphology [6] and the computational analysis of writing systems. [7]