Heather Lent joined the DKW group on September 1st. At the moment she is working as research assistant, but from November she will change to a position as postdoc.
Research Area and Focus
- My research involves extending natural language processing (NLP) technologies to lower-resourced languages, which tend to be excluded from the majority of NLP works, due to the challenges of limited data. Of these languages, I have thus far focused on Creoles, a diverse collection of languages spoken in many diverse regions of the world (e.g. Haitian Kreyol in the Caribbean; Sranan Tongo in South America; Nigerian Pidgin in Africa; Singlish in Asia; Hawaiian Pidgin in the Pacific).
Projects
- I am working on the “Multilingual Modeling for Resource-Poor Languages” project, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. As part of this project, my goals are to 1) promote Creoles and other lower-resourced languages within the field of NLP 2) develop new methods and techniques for lower-resource NLP, such as improved transfer learning, & 3) engage with the communities speaking these languages, to ensure that our research yields a positive impact for speakers, according to their wants and needs.
Fun & other facts
- I enjoy spending time with friends, going to live music shows, and playing D&D. In my free time, I am also learning to play the bass guitar.