Languages and Cultures

Yan Cong

Yan Cong's work focuses on language in humans and machines. Yan works in the areas of natural language processing (NLP), semantics and pragmatics, and speech and language technology. Yan is currently developing text analysis models to quantify, understand, and improve language learning. Yan’s core interests are the science of language, but Yan is also motivated by potential applications. Yan hopes to put what we know to good use and provide options for students. Yan is interested in translating NLP and AI methods to other fields such as language education and general healthcare, directly helping learners, teachers, and practitioners. To that end, Yan is committed to developing robust AI systems in language research and applied linguistics contexts.

Elsayed Issa

Elsayed’s research program focuses on conversational AI, machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP). More specifically, his interdisciplinary research agenda lies at the intersection of NLP, conversational AI, and Second Language Acquisition (SLA), with a goal to innovate more equitable, efficient, and educational machines for second language learning. He is focused on developing a novel set of tools and ideas to combine computational linguistics and SLA methods. He works towards training and finetuning open-source, end-to-end (i.e., neural and Transformer architectures) Large Language Models (LLMs), speech-to-text (STT), and text-to-speech (TTS) models. Additionally, he adopts computational techniques for modeling speech, intonation, and prosody.