Research

Work with Me

Western students interested in doing research with me should send an e-mail to sara.ng (at) wwu.edu, or discuss in person. The kind of projects I am happy to advise on include but are not limited to:

• phonetic analysis
• speech classification
• error analysis of speech technology
• speech recognition
• phonological analysis

You do not need to have a project in mind to get started doing research! Come talk to me and we can discuss ideas or existing projects that you may want to work on.

Theses

• Prosody in Human Communication and Machine Understanding
• Musical text-setting as evidence for syllabficiation of highly moraic structures in English

Publications

• [2024] Nicolas Ballier, Léa Burin, Behnoosh Namdarzadeh, Sara Ng, Richard Wright, Jean-Baptiste Yunès
  Probing Whisper Predictions for French, English and Persian Transcriptions
  7th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (accepted)

• [2024] Marina Oganyan, Gina-Anne Levow, Robert Squizzero, Emily P. Ahn, Sara Ng, Ella Deaton, Richard Wright
  Investigating the Acoustic Fidelity of Vowels across Remote Recording Methods
  Linguistics Vanguard (accepted)

• [2024] Sara Ng, Gina-Anne Levow, Mari Ostendorf, Richard Wright
  Investigating the Influence of Stance-Taking on Conversational Timing of Task-Oriented Speech
  INTERSPEECH

• [2024] Sara Ng, Valerie Freeman, Gina-Anne Levow, Mari Ostendorf, Richard Wright
  Effects of Information Load and Pragmatic Load on the Hypo-Hyper Continuum
  Fonetik 2024

• [2023] Sara Ng, Abigail Schwendiman Sleight
  Properties of Constructed Language Phonological Inventories
  University of Washington Working Papers in Linguistics
  Link to online interface

• [2022] Yeonjin Cho, Sara Ng, Trang Tran, Mari Ostendorf
  Leveraging Prosody for Punctuation Prediction of Spontaneous Speech
  INTERSPEECH

• [2022] Andrew Hard, Kurt Partridge, Neng Chen, Sean Augenstein, Aishanee Shah, Hyun Jin Park, Alex Park, Sara Ng, Jessica Nguyen, Ignacio Lopez Moreno, and others
  Production federated keyword spotting via distillation, filtering, and joint federated-centralized training
  INTERSPEECH

• [2021] Sara Ng, Gregory M. Ellis, Pamela E. Souza, Frederick J. Gallun, Richard A. Wright, Mari Ostendorf
  Assessing the stability of the spectro-temporal cue weighting angle for listener categorization
  Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

• [2021] Courtney Mansfield, Sara Ng, Gina-Anne Levow, Richard Wright, Mari Ostendorf
  Revisiting Parity of Human vs. Machine Conversational Speech Transcription
  INTERSPEECH

Presentations

• [2022] Emily P. Ahn, William Bowers, Ella Deaton, Gina-Anne Levow, Sara Ng, Marina Oganyan, Robert Squizzero, Richard A. Wright
  Investigating the acoustic fidelity of remote recording methods
  Acoustical Society of America, poster

• [2021] Sara Ng, Gregory Ellis, Pamela Souza, Frederick Gallun, Richard Wright
  Modeling the time course of cue weighting angle calculations
  Acoustical Society of America, poster

• [2021] Courtney Mansfield, Sara Ng Gina-Anne Levow, Mari Ostendorf, Richard Wright
  What does parity mean? A detailed comparison of ASR and human transcription errors
  Acoustical Society of America, talk

• [2018] Sara Ng, Joselyn Roriguez and Abby Kaplan
  Musical Evidence for Syllabification Patterns of Highly Moraic Structures in English
  Linguistic Society of America, poster

• [2017] Jenica Jessen, Sara Ng and Joselyn Rodriguez
  Musical Evidence for Syllabification Patterns in English
  University of Utah Student Conference in Linguistics, talk

• [2017] Jenica Jessen and Sara Ng
  Musical Evidence for Syllabification Patterns of Highly Moraic Structures in English
  Undergraduate Research Symposium, University of Utah, poster

Research Tool Demos

English Word Class Generator (beta)

English Minimal Pair Generator (beta)

“Tap a rhythm or play a melody” (mTurk) [Example 1, Example 2] (these are not currently active)

Opinions on Toisanese Sentences Survey (not currently active)

Student Work

The following are a representation of the work that I completed as a student:

• An LSTM Architecture for Phonotactically-Informed Word Segmentation [pdf]
• A chatbot for learning about mental health disorders [pdf]
• Metalinguistic Judgments of Idiomatic Language in Diaspora Hoisanva [pdf]
• Acoustic Cues of Morphological Contrast Focus in Taishanese [pdf]
• Phonemic Inventory of Marshallese, and some General Properties [pdf]
• Properties of Constructed Language Phonological Inventories [pdf]]
• An Error Analysis of the English Resource Grammar with English Learner Data, and Application [pdf]
• A Survey of Minimalist Analyses of Floating Quantifiers in German [pdf]
• An Overview of Dependent Plurals in English, and Some Interesting Cases [pdf]
• Gemination in Taishanese explained by Autosegmentalism [pdf]