Luke Gessler

Luke Gessler

Hi, I’m Luke! I’m an assistant professor at Indiana University’s Department of Linguistics, with adjunct appointments in Computer Science and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Previously, I was a postdoc in the NALA Group at CU Boulder, and I got my Ph.D. in computational linguistics at Georgetown University with the Corpling lab and NERT. I am interested in low-resource NLP and language resource development, particularly in the context of endangered language documentation.

Research

Modern natural language processing (NLP) models are powerful but require vast amounts of data. This has led to a performance gap between a handful of high-resource languages which have enough data to fully exploit models' capabilities (like Russian or English), and low-resource languages (like Mohawk or Uyghur), which lack the data volume required to fully realize models' potential. This is regrettable, as poorer performing models may induce many inequities (such as socioeconomic ones), and most of the world’s languages may not be spoken by the close of the century and are in need of high-quality language technologies to aid efforts to document and revitalize them.

My work is broadly aimed at addressing this performance gap between high- and low-resource languages by developing linguistically-informed resources and algorithms which can help low-resource languages overcome the onerous demands of the deep learning methods which have become dominant in NLP. Most of my work can be seen as belonging to at least one of the three following threads:

  • Language resource development: creation and maintenance of natural language corpora enriched with linguistic analyses.

  • Low-resource NLP: development of methods specifically for languages with little data.

  • NLP-capable language documentation systems: developing systems aimed at language documentation, i.e. the process of collecting and describing data in a particular language, with an emphasis on deep integration with NLP systems to facilitate the documentary process.

Online

Here is my…

Also, I’m webmaster of the langdoc.net discussion forum, a place for anyone interested in language documentation and language technology. Come join us!

Publications