C.M. Downey
@cmdowney.com
Assistant Prof. in Ling & DataSci/AI, University of Rochester
Director: ur2nlp lab (ur2nlp.io)
NLP for low-resource and endangered languages
cmdowney.io
Director: ur2nlp lab (ur2nlp.io)
NLP for low-resource and endangered languages
cmdowney.io
I'm recruiting Linguistics PhD students! Come work with me on all things multilingual and low-resource NLP! NLP background welcome, but commitment to scientific study of language is essential. My recent work has included ASR for field linguistics and compact LLMs for heritage languages
Graduate Program
sas.rochester.edu
August 20, 2026 at 5:21 PM
I'm recruiting Linguistics PhD students! Come work with me on all things multilingual and low-resource NLP! NLP background welcome, but commitment to scientific study of language is essential. My recent work has included ASR for field linguistics and compact LLMs for heritage languages
Reposted by C.M. Downey
Congratulations to @mginn.bsky.social, @covetedfish.bsky.social, Ali Marashian, @mvalentini.bsky.social, @alexispalmer.bsky.social & friends for receiving an Outstanding Paper award at #ACL2026 for the paper "Massively Multilingual Joint Segmentation and Glossing".
aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon...
aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon...
Massively Multilingual Joint Segmentation and Glossing
Michael Ginn, Lindia Tjuatja, Enora Rice, Ali Marashian, Maria Valentini, Jasmine Xu, Graham Neubig, Alexis Palmer. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguist...
aclanthology.org
July 9, 2026 at 4:23 PM
Congratulations to @mginn.bsky.social, @covetedfish.bsky.social, Ali Marashian, @mvalentini.bsky.social, @alexispalmer.bsky.social & friends for receiving an Outstanding Paper award at #ACL2026 for the paper "Massively Multilingual Joint Segmentation and Glossing".
aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon...
aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon...
Reposted by C.M. Downey
I wanted to see which locally-runnable models are most effective for cultural heritage languages, this page has comparisons of 7 languages: mimno.github.io/PhiloBench/ llama3.1 and mistral are both powerful and fast!
PhiloBench Preview
mimno.github.io
June 11, 2026 at 3:13 PM
I wanted to see which locally-runnable models are most effective for cultural heritage languages, this page has comparisons of 7 languages: mimno.github.io/PhiloBench/ llama3.1 and mistral are both powerful and fast!
Reposted by C.M. Downey
After the enthusiasm of the shared task last year, we are running another shared task to create a community-made, culturally relevant multilingual benchmark! The deadline to contribute is August 1 AoE. See more details below.
June 8, 2026 at 6:39 PM
After the enthusiasm of the shared task last year, we are running another shared task to create a community-made, culturally relevant multilingual benchmark! The deadline to contribute is August 1 AoE. See more details below.
Reposted by C.M. Downey
📢 Call for Papers:
6th Multilingual Representation Learning Workshop at EMNLP in Budapest, Hungary!
Join us and submit your works relating to multilingual NLP
Speakers to be announced, so stay tuned! 👀
More info in the CFP:
🔗 sigtyp.github.io/ws2026-mrl.html
6th Multilingual Representation Learning Workshop at EMNLP in Budapest, Hungary!
Join us and submit your works relating to multilingual NLP
Speakers to be announced, so stay tuned! 👀
More info in the CFP:
🔗 sigtyp.github.io/ws2026-mrl.html
May 27, 2026 at 3:46 PM
📢 Call for Papers:
6th Multilingual Representation Learning Workshop at EMNLP in Budapest, Hungary!
Join us and submit your works relating to multilingual NLP
Speakers to be announced, so stay tuned! 👀
More info in the CFP:
🔗 sigtyp.github.io/ws2026-mrl.html
6th Multilingual Representation Learning Workshop at EMNLP in Budapest, Hungary!
Join us and submit your works relating to multilingual NLP
Speakers to be announced, so stay tuned! 👀
More info in the CFP:
🔗 sigtyp.github.io/ws2026-mrl.html
More students to brag about: congrats to @beichengbei.bsky.social, @hannahchun8011.bsky.social, and @cguo3.bsky.social, who had their Deep Learning term paper accepted to the Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative!
arxiv.org/abs/2604.10786
arxiv.org/abs/2604.10786
Do BERT Embeddings Encode Narrative Dimensions? A Token-Level Probing Analysis of Time, Space, Causality, and Character in Fiction
Narrative understanding requires multidimensional semantic structures. This study investigates whether BERT embeddings encode dimensions of fictional narrative semantics -- time, space, causality, and...
arxiv.org
April 21, 2026 at 4:54 PM
More students to brag about: congrats to @beichengbei.bsky.social, @hannahchun8011.bsky.social, and @cguo3.bsky.social, who had their Deep Learning term paper accepted to the Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative!
arxiv.org/abs/2604.10786
arxiv.org/abs/2604.10786
Congratulations to @feiyuehchen.bsky.social and Lateef Adeleke who successfully converted their term paper on feature-level ASR evaluation into a publication to appear at the AfricaNLP workshop at EACL next month!
pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2602.04716
pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2602.04716
Linguistically Informed Evaluation of Multilingual ASR for African Languages
Word Error Rate (WER) mischaracterizes ASR models' performance for African languages by combining phonological, tone, and other linguistic errors into a single lexical error. By contrast, Feature Erro...
arxiv.org
February 5, 2026 at 4:57 PM
Congratulations to @feiyuehchen.bsky.social and Lateef Adeleke who successfully converted their term paper on feature-level ASR evaluation into a publication to appear at the AfricaNLP workshop at EACL next month!
pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2602.04716
pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2602.04716
I'm recruiting Linguistics PhD students this cycle! You should apply to work with me if you're interested in anything low-resource NLP. Some topics I'm particularly excited about currently:
November 6, 2025 at 4:03 PM
I'm recruiting Linguistics PhD students this cycle! You should apply to work with me if you're interested in anything low-resource NLP. Some topics I'm particularly excited about currently:
One week left to apply: I'm recruiting (Ling) PhD students! Come work with me on getting NLP to work for as wide a range of languages as possible! Some perks of UR:
- Only have to TA 2 semesters total
- At least $3k discretionary funds for e.g. conferences
- Easy access to upstate NY nature
- Only have to TA 2 semesters total
- At least $3k discretionary funds for e.g. conferences
- Easy access to upstate NY nature
November 22, 2024 at 4:49 PM
One week left to apply: I'm recruiting (Ling) PhD students! Come work with me on getting NLP to work for as wide a range of languages as possible! Some perks of UR:
- Only have to TA 2 semesters total
- At least $3k discretionary funds for e.g. conferences
- Easy access to upstate NY nature
- Only have to TA 2 semesters total
- At least $3k discretionary funds for e.g. conferences
- Easy access to upstate NY nature
Reposted by C.M. Downey
Do you want to understand how language models work, and how they can change language science? I'm recruiting PhD students at UBC Linguistics! The research will be fun, and Vancouver is lovely. So much cool NLP happening at UBC across both Ling and CS! linguistics.ubc.ca/graduate/adm...
November 18, 2024 at 7:43 PM
Do you want to understand how language models work, and how they can change language science? I'm recruiting PhD students at UBC Linguistics! The research will be fun, and Vancouver is lovely. So much cool NLP happening at UBC across both Ling and CS! linguistics.ubc.ca/graduate/adm...