Eric M. Jackson

I am a “full-stack linguist” now teaching in the Master’s in Human Language Technology program in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. What do I mean by “full-stack” in this context? It means I’m comfortable working in any of the primary domains of linguistics, from phonetics to semantics. My teaching now also covers many topics in Natural Language Processing.

I studied both physics (way, way back) and linguistics as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona and went on to graduate study in linguistics at UCLA. After completing a PhD in Linguistics in 2005, I worked in southern China and Southeast Asia in community-based Applied Linguistics for SIL Global, an international language development NGO. This work included cooperative projects with government agencies, minority language community members, and curriculum development and teaching in a joint Masters program in Kunming. Although that is no longer my full-time role, I continue to volunteer my time to support SIL’s work.

I have designed and taught a variety of courses in linguistics, in both English and Chinese. Good teaching requires solid domain knowledge, but it also requires an understanding of foundational pedagogical principles.

Most of my current teaching helps students gain the skills to develop and use computational tools for applications within natural language. Although many current natural language tools have been developed for high-resource languages like English, my passion is to see these computational tools also empowering language communities that don’t have huge existing datasets. For this reason, my work also includes teaching that aims to build capacity for technology development among language community members themselves.