I'm a computational linguist. I'm broadly interested in understanding how natural language is or can be learned, both by humans and machines. While my day job is to lead a team of software and data engineers, after work I morph into my underlying form of a linguist. Topics I've worked on include inflection classes, morphological segmentation, word segmentation, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, truncation, tone, and reduplication. I hold a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, where I worked with John Goldsmith on computational morphology and phonology.

News

  • Area Chair, the "CL/NLP and Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics" track of COLING 2022
  • Co-organizer, Shared Task on Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion (Low-Resource and Cross-Lingual), SIGMORPHON 2022, co-located with NAACL 2022

Publications

2023
The SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task on Cross-lingual and Low-Resource Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion. Arya D. McCarthy, Jackson L. Lee, Alexandra DeLucia, Travis Bartley, Milind Agarwal, Lucas F.E. Ashby, Luca Del Signore, Cameron Gibson, Reuben Raff, Winston Wu. Proceedings of the 20th SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology.
[ link | bib | abstract ]
2022
PyCantonese: Cantonese Linguistics and NLP in Python. Jackson L. Lee, Litong Chen, Charles Lam, Chaak Ming Lau, Tsz-Him Tsui. Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.
[ pdf | bib | abstract | software documentation ]
2020
Massively Multilingual Pronunciation Modeling with WikiPron. Jackson L. Lee, Lucas F. E. Ashby, M. Elizabeth Garza, Yeonju Lee-Sikka, Sean Miller, Alan Wong, Arya D. McCarthy, Kyle Gorman. Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.
[ link | bib | abstract | data and code ]
2018
Shaping Phonology. Edited by Diane Brentari and Jackson L. Lee. University of Chicago Press. (This volume is in honor of John Goldsmith.)
[ website | bib | abstract ]
 
On the discovery procedure. Jackson L. Lee. Shaping Phonology. Edited by Diane Brentari and Jackson L. Lee.
 
Mincing words: balancing recovery and deletion in word truncation. Mike Pham and Jackson L. Lee. Glossa.
[ link | bib | abstract | data and code ]
2017
Computational learning of morphology. John A. Goldsmith, Jackson L. Lee, and Aris Xanthos. Annual Review of Linguistics 3, 85-106.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]
2016
Linguistica 5: Unsupervised Learning of Linguistic Structure. Jackson L. Lee and John A. Goldsmith. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, San Diego, California, June 2016. Association for Computational Linguistics.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]
 
Working with CHAT transcripts in Python. Jackson L. Lee, Ross Burkholder, Gallagher B. Flinn, and Emily R. Coppess. Technical Report TR-2016-02, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, January 2016.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]
2015
Morphological Paradigms: Computational Structure and Unsupervised Learning. Jackson L. Lee. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2015 Student Research Workshop (SRW), pages 161--167, Denver, Colorado, June 2015. Association for Computational Linguistics.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]
 
Great pizzas, ghost negations: The emergence and persistence of mixed expressives. Andrea Beltrama and Jackson L. Lee. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 19. 2015.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]
 
When French becomes tonal: Prosodic transfer from L1 Cantonese and L2 English. Jackson L. Lee and Stephen Matthews. In The 6th Annual Proceedings of the Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, 2015.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]
2014
Combining successor and predecessor frequencies to model truncation in Brazilian Portuguese. Mike Pham and Jackson L. Lee. Technical Report TR-2014-15, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, October 2014.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]
 
Automatic morphological alignment and clustering. Jackson L. Lee. Technical Report TR-2014-07, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, May 2014.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]
 
Variability in perceived duration: pitch dynamics and vowel quality. Alan C. L. Yu, Hyunjung Lee, and Jackson L. Lee. In Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages, May 2014.
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The representation of contour tones in Cantonese. Jackson L. Lee. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 2014.
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Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Andrea Beltrama, Tasos Chatzikonstantinou, Jackson L. Lee, Mike Pham, and Diane Rak, editors. Chicago Linguistic Society, 2014.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]
2012
Fixed-tone reduplication in Cantonese. Jackson L. Lee. In McGill Working Papers in Linguistics 22(1). Proceedings from the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto (MOT) Phonology Workshop 2011: Phonology in the 21st Century: In Honour of Glyne Piggott. 2012.
[ pdf | bib | abstract ]