Emily P. Ahn
Language enthusiast.

eahn @ uw . edu
I am a linguist and recent PhD graduate in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington where I was advised by Gina-Anne Levow, Richard Wright, and Eleanor Chodroff. My work has focused on analyzing aspects of the corpus phonetics pipeline to enable the study of multilingual and low-resourced language varieties. My dissertation titled Investigating the Corpus Phonetics Pipeline Applied to Diverse Speech Data is available here and on ProQuest.
Through the support of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, some of my past projects include analyzing acoustic word embeddings of multilingual named entities, investigating accommodation in code-switched dialogues, and detecting microaggressions in social media text. I have completed my Masters at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was co-advised by Alan Black and Yulia Tsvetkov. Before any graduate studies, I spent 1 year at SRI International, working in their Speech Technology and Research Lab. Prior to that, I graduated from Wellesley College in 2016, where I studied Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences with a concentration in Computer Science. I encourage students to contact me with questions about Computational Linguistics, NLP, graduate school, applications, etc—just email me!
When I’m not working, I like to knit, crochet, play drums, listen to jazz, and most of all share meals and conversations with friends. Once upon a time, I did taekwondo and rowing for sport.
news
Jul 28, 2025 | Two papers being presented at ACL 2025! 1) Automatic Phone Alignment of Code-switched Urum–Russian Field Data at the FIeld Matters Workshop 2025 [code/paper]; 2) A Comparative Approach for Auditing Multilingual Phonetic Transcript Archives in TACL |
Jun 14, 2025 | Defended my PhD defense and graduated! Thanks everyone for your support! |
Jun 25, 2024 | Three accepted papers! 1) The Use of Phone Categories and Cross-Language Modeling for Phone Alignment of Panãra in INTERSPEECH 2024 [paper] [poster]; 2) Comparing Language-specific and Cross-language Acoustic Models for Low-resource Phonetic Forced Alignment in Language Documentation & Conservation; 3) Investigating the Acoustic Fidelity of Vowels across Remote Recording Methods in Linguistics Vanguard [paper] |
Mar 27, 2024 | Giving an invited talk at Columbia NLP Seminar (Spring 2024): Investigating the Corpus Phonetics Pipeline applied to Diverse Language Data |
Mar 22, 2024 | Presented an extended abstract at ComputEL-7 workshop: Phonetic Granularity Effects on Forced Alignment Across Panãra and English |
Mar 11, 2024 | Defended my General Examination. I’m a PhD Candidate now! |
Aug 22, 2023 | Presented a paper at INTERSPEECH 2023: An Outlier Analysis of Vowel Formants from a Corpus Phonetics Pipeline [paper] [poster] |
Jul 20, 2023 | Began co-instructing a summer course: UW LING 473 Basics for Computational Linguistics! |
Jun 9, 2023 | Awarded the UW Excellence in Linguistic Research Graduate Fellowship! |
Sep 24, 2022 | Shared thoughts on Data Collection, Bias, and Ethical Concerns in Speech Processing as a Panelist for the Speech for Social Good workshop at INTERSPEECH 2022 [video] |