Keelan's Home Page

This is me rounding Devil's Elbow in the 2003 Mt. Diablo Challenge. It is a bicycle race near the Bay Area, and I was one of 9 unicyclists in the pack that year. The total distance was 10.8 miles and the gain in elevation was 3,249 feet (my time 2:10).

CV
Download a pdf copy of my CV.

Research
I'm a fifth-year graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the Linguistics Department. My thesis advisor is Bill Labov (download my thesis proposal). I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2002 with a double major in Linguistics and Classical Languages. My current research projects include:

• dialect contact and the North / Midland boundary in Western PA
• automatic identification and classification of American English dialects
• call classification for automated troubleshooting
• the influence of AAVE on Puerto Rican English

Publications

• to appear. The phonetic realization of pitch accent in Huave. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Berkeley Linguistics Society. [pdf]
• 2009. D. Suendermann, K. Evanini, J. Liscombe, P. Hunter, K. Dayanidhi, and R. Pieraccini. From rule-based to statistical grammars: Continuous improvement of large-scale spoken dialog systems. Proc. ICASSP 2009. [pdf]
• 2008. D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, K. Evanini, K. Dayanidhi, R. Pieraccini. C^5. Proc. SLT 2008. [pdf]
• 2008. K. Evanini, P. Hunter, J. Liscombe, D. Suendermann, K. Dayanidhi, R. Pieraccini. Caller Experience: A method for evaluating dialog systems and its automated prediction. Proc. SLT 2008. [pdf]
• 2008. A shift of allegiance: The case of Erie and the North / Midland dialect boundary. Selected Papers from NWAV 36, University of Pennsylvania Working Ppaers in Linguistics, v. 14.2. [pdf]
• 2008. Classifying and clustering dialects of North American English. Proceedings of NESCAI 2008. [pdf]
• 2007. K. Evanini, D. Suendermann, R. Pieraccini. Call classification for automated troubleshooting on large corpora. Proceedings of ASRU 2007. [pdf]
• 2007. How to formalize variation: Stochastic OT models and /s/ deletion in Spanish. Proceedings of LACUS 33, Linguistic Association of Canada and the US. [pdf]
• 2007. Book note for American English: dialects and variation. Language in Society 36(1):7-8.
• 2006. T. Wolford and K. Evanini. Features of AAVE as Features of PRE: A Study of Adolescents in Philadelphia. Selected Papers from NWAV 34, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, v. 12.2. [pdf]
• 2005. K. Evanini and G. Nguyen. Papers from NWAVE 32, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, v. 10.2.

Software
These are programs that I have found useful. The quality of documentation, portability, usability, etc. varies widely among them. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about them, or if you'd like to suggest improvements.

• quickTrans: a collection of shell, python, and Praat scripts that I use for transcribing interviews [download | README]