I am a linguist based in Singapore. My interests include Language Documentation and Description, Natural Language Processing, Historical Linguistics, and Language Change, among other things. I use computational tools and methods to investigate properties of language, and have proposed the “Min-Max theory of language behavior” as a major driver of language evolution. This site is currently under construction, so please bear with me as I get it working again.

Research

For my PhD (2015) I wrote a Grammar of Pnar, based on extensive texts transcribed from stories told by native speakers in and around Jowai, Meghalaya, India. Since then I have conducted fieldwork on a number of other Austroasiatic languages in Thailand and Myanmar, and continue to be involved in historical linguistic research within the phylum, as well as developing databases for low-resource languages. My other main strand of research involves training large language models (LLMs), most recently for automating implicit motive coding, though I also develop models for other purposes, such as for use by authors.

Courses

I currently teach several courses at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, at both the undergraduate and masters levels including:

• Language and the Computer
• Anthropological Linguistics
• Languages of the World
• Sociolinguistic Research Methods