Robert Pugh

I'm a PhD student in Computational Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. I mainly work on language technology for indigenous languages of Mexico (especially Nahuatl), and explore the role that such technologies can play in reversing language shift (RLS) and language documentation. I'm generally interested in NLP for related languages and varieties, language contact, computational morphology, code-switching and multilingualism, and cross- and multi-lingual learning. I am a part of Fran Tyers's laboratory, Inclusive Technologies for Marginalised Languages (ITML).

Contact

• email: *lastname* rob at iu dot edu

News

• 04/2024: I will be presenting three papers at NAACL this year, one in the main conference ("A Universal Dependencies Treebank for Highland Puebla Nahuatl"), one at Vardial ("Experiments in Multivariant Natural Languae Processing for Nahuatl") and one at AmericasNLP ("Wav2pos: Exploring syntactic analysis from audio for Highland Puebla Nahuatl").
• 08/2023: Excited to be a part of an NSF-funded project developing syntactically annotated corpora of Mesoamerican languages.
• 07/2023: Our submission achieved first place 🥇 in the IberLEF2023 Guaraní-Spanish Code Switching shared task!
• 07/2023: We had three papers accepted at the 3rd Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
• 06/2023: I am happy to announce that I was selected to participate in Google Summer of Code with the Apertium project
• 05/2022: Our paper, "Universal Dependencies for Western Sierra Puebla Nahuatl", was accepted to LREC 2022!
• 05/2022: Thanks for everyone involved in making the "Jornadas de las tecnologías del habla - México" possible.
• 11/2022: Check out the recordings from El Segundo Congreso Internacional de Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural para Lenguas Indígenas! Day 1 Day 2
• 11/2022: I recently participated in the Taller práctico sobre la anotación sintáctica de corpus para las lenguas indígenas de las Américas.

Publications

2024
• Pugh, R. and Tyers, F. M. (2024) "A Universal Dependencies Treebank for Highland Puebla Nahuatl". Proceedings of the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (slides)
• Pugh, R. and Tyers, F. M. (2024) "Experiments in Multivariant Natural Language Processing for Nahuatl". VarDial 2024.(slides)
• Pugh, R. Sreedhar, V., and Tyers, F. M. (2024) "Wav2pos: Exploring syntactic analysis from audio for Highland Puebla Nahuatl". AmericasNLP 2024.
2023
• Pugh, R. and Tyers, F.M. (2023). “The ITML Submission to the IberLEF2023 Shared Task on Guarani-Spanish Code Switching Analysis”. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 71. [to appear]
• Pugh, R., Castañeda, Q., Tyers, F. M. (2023) "Developing finite-state language technology for Maya". Third Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
• Tyers, F. M., Pugh, R., Berthoud F., V. A. (2023) "Codex to corpus: Exploring annotation and processing for an open and extensible machine-readable edition of the Florentine Codex". Third Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
• Tyers, F. M., Pugh, R. (2023) "A finite-state morphological analyser for Highland Puebla Nahuatl". Third Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
• O'Neil, A., Swanson, D., Pugh, R., Ngué Um, E. and Tyers, F. M. (2023) "Comparing methods of orthographic conversion for Bàsàá, a language of Cameroon". Fourth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023) (pp. 97-105).
2022
• Pugh, R., Huerta Mendez, M., Sasaki, M., and Tyers, F.M. (2022) "Universal Dependencies for Western Sierra Puebla Nahuatl". LREC 2022 Conference Proceedings pp.5011-5020.
2021
• Pugh, R. and Tyers, F. M. (2021) "Investigating variation in written forms of Nahuatl using character-based language models". Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP) pp.21-27.
• Pugh, R., Tyers, F. M., and Huerta Mendez, M. (2021) "Towards an Open Source Finite-State Morphological Analyzer for Zacatlán-Ahuacatlán-Tepetzintla Nahuatl". Proceedings of ComputEL4 pp.80-85.
2020
• Rios, J. A., Ling, G., Pugh, R., Becker, D.M., Bacall, A.N. (2020). Identifying critical 21st Century for workplace success: A content analysis of job advertisements. Educational Researcher, 49 pp.80-89.
2019
• Riordan, B., Flor, M., & Pugh, R. (2019). How to account for mispellings: Quantifying the benefit of character representations in neural content scoring models. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications pp. 116-126.
• Qian, Y., Lange, P., Evanini, K., Pugh, R., Ubale, R., Mulholland, M., & Wang, X. (2019). Neural approaches to automated speech scoring of monologue and dialogue responses. In ICASSP 2019-2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) pp. 8112-8116. IEEE.
• Ramanarayanan, V., Pugh, R., Qian, Y., & Suendermann-Oeft, D. (2019). Automatic Turn-Level Language Identification for Code-Switched Spanish–English Dialog. In 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology pp. 51-61. Springer, Singapore.
2018
• Ramanarayanan, V., & Pugh, R. (2018, July). Automatic token and turn level language identification for code-switched text dialog: An analysis across language pairs and corpora. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue pp. 80-8.
• Evanini, K., Mulholland, M., Ubale, R., Qian, Y., Pugh, R. A., Ramanarayanan, V., & Cahill, A. (2018). Improvements to an Automated Content Scoring System for Spoken CALL Responses: the ETS Submission to the Second Spoken CALL Shared Task. In INTERSPEECH pp. 2379-2383.
2017
• Malmasi, S., Evanini, K., Cahill, A., Tetreault, J., Pugh, R., Hamill, C., ... & Qian, Y. (2017, September). A report on the 2017 native language identification shared task. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications pp. 62-75.

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Organizations

• Inclusive Technologies for Marginalised Languages (ITML)
• Comunidad Elotl: 🌽 Tecnologías para lenguas mexicanas
• Radio Tsinaka: Radio comunitaria en la sierra norte de puebla
• IU graduate workers coalition
• KPFA: Community-powered radio from the Bay Area, CA.





Miscellaneous Interesting Links

The abolition of work | Schools for Chiapas | Norvig-Chomsky debate | A dark room (browser game) | Library of Juggling N