Golconda Fort, Hyderabad, India, January 2008	Richard Sproat     史伯樂
	ರಿಚರ್ಡ್ ಸ್ಪ್ರೋಟ್
	Dept of Linguistics
	Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering
	Adjunct, Dept of Computer Science
	Adjunct, Dept of Psychology
	Beckman Institute
	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
	Foreign Languages Building 4016D,
	707 South Mathews Avenue, MC-168
	Urbana, IL, 61801
	Phone: +1-217-244-4120 (Beckman, Room 2057)
	Fax:     +1-217-244-8430
	Click here for recent stuff. Most recent: Talk on evolutionary modeling of morphology in UIUC Linguistics Seminar, May 1, 2008

NEW! The Book

I am a computational linguist (which means that I have some things in common with grapefruit).

I am a professor in the departments of Linguistics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am also a full-time faculty member at the Beckman Institute. I have courtesy appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Psychology. I am chair of the new certificate program in Language and Speech Processing at UIUC.

I am also a visiting scientist at Google Labs, and have an Adjunct Faculty position at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Health and Science University.

Current Research Interests

My current research interests include:

• Language modeling for colloquial Arabic speech recognition.
• Named entity detection and transliteration for multiple languages. Web page.
• Prediction of prosody from text for affective speech synthesis. Web page.
• Acoustic and pronunciation modeling for accented standard Chinese. (Follow up on work done at WS'04)
• The relation to layout to phonological awareness in scripts of South Asia.
• Automated Methods for Second-Language Fluency Assessment. Web page (password protected).
• Interpretation of location descriptions for botanical/zoological specimen labels.
• Other serious stuff.

I also run the Computational Linguistics Lab at the Beckman Institute. See that website for further information on some of the above projects.

I am very interested in writing systems; see some work I was doing on approximate string matching in the Easter Island rongorongo script. I also ran (with Jerry Packard) a reading group centered around Hannas' controversial thesis relating Asia's supposed technological creativity gap, with the Chinese writing system.

Prior to coming to UIUC

Before joining Ken's department I worked in the Human/Computer Interaction Research Department headed by Candy Kamm. My most recent project in that department was WordsEye, an automatic text-to-scene conversion system. The WordsEye technology is now being developed at Semantic Light, LLC. WordsEye is particularly good for creating surrealistic images that I can easily conceive of but are well beyond my artistic ability to execute. All of the following images were generated from text descriptions of the scene. Click on the images to see the text that generated the scene:

Prior to joining AT&T Labs in 1999 I worked on Text-to-Speech Synthesis at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. Among other things, I was responsible for the multilingual text processing module of the Bell Labs Multilingual TTS System.

My Old Home Page at Bell Labs

Here is my old home page at Bell Labs, which I left in 1999, and which for some reason has never gone away.

Recent Stuff

Talk on evolutionary modeling of morphology in UIUC Linguistics Seminar, May 1, 2008

My recent visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky.

Talk on the Phaistos Disk in the September 6, 2007, Linguistics Seminar at UIUC.

Co-organizer (with Steve Farmer) of a workshop on Scripts, Non-scripts and (Pseudo)-decipherment, July 11 2007, to be held in conjunction with the 2007 LSA Summer Institute at Stanford University.

Guest lecture on WordsEye in LING 588, Spring 2007.

In Spring 2007 I am teaching a new, and I believe unique, course entitled Language, Technology and Society (LING270). The course covers language-related technology from the earliest writing systems all the way up to modern speech and language processing. It also explores the social implications of some of these technologies.

I was technical co-chair (with Yuji Matsumoto) of the 21st International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, December 17--19, 2006.

I was co-chair (with Dan Roth) of the Third Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium.

Presentation at SALA 25.

Guidance for researchers contemplating doing joint research with colleagues in India.

Keynote address at Second Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium.

Slides for my talk for the April 22, 2005, Beckman Institute Director's seminar.

See Shalom Lappin's and my challenge to the Minimalist Program.

Slides from my tutorial, with Tim Buckwalter, at the Arabic Linguistics Symposium, April 3, 2005, UIUC.

A travelog from India.

A new article with Steve Farmer and Michael Witzel in the Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, 11(2), 2004 argues that the so-called Indus Valley script was not a writing system at all. The December 17, 2004 issue of Science ran a feature on our work. Evidently this article has caused a bit of a stir in some circles. See the related challenge (worth $10,000!!) to prove that I'm an idiot.