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. 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
• using forced alignment for linguistic research
• automatic extraction of formant measurements for sociophonetic research

Dissertation
The title of my dissertation is The permeability of dialect boundaries: A case study of the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania. I defended my thesis proposal in May, 2008 (download a copy of my proposal). I defended my thesis on August 28, 2009. Here are drafts of the chapters:

• Front Matter: title page, acknowledgements, abstract, table of contents, list of figures, list of tables
• Chapter 1: introduction to the empirical, methodological, and theoretical aims of the dissertation
• Chapter 2: a review of the evidence from earlier dialect geography studies (LAMSAS, DARE) that show Erie's phonology and lexicon to be Northern
• Chapter 3: a description of my data collection procedure, including how I contacted speakers for inclusion in my corpus, a description of the interview materials, and how the interviews were processed
• Chapter 4: a description of the procedure I used for automatic vowel analysis including forced alignment, measurement point selection, and formant prediction
• Chapter 5: natural break maps for 17 vowel classes
• Chapter 6: a study of the merger of /o/ and /oh/ in the Erie region
• Chapter 7: a study of other vowels that pattern differently in the Midland and the North (/ow/, /uw/, /ae/, /o/)
• Chapter 8: an investigation into the use of Midland lexical and morphosyntactic features in Erie
• Chapter 9: the settlement history of Erie and how it helps explain the course of linguistic change in the region
• Chapter 10: some brief concluding remarks
• References
• Appendices: materials used in the interview, including the word list, minimal pairs, sentences for acceptability judgments, and DARE's reading passage

Publications

• to appear. The phonetic realization of pitch accent in Huave. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Berkeley Linguistics Society. [pdf]
• 2009. J. Tauberer and K. Evanini. Intrinsic vowel duration and the post-vocalic voicing effect: Some evidence from dialects of North American English. Proc. Interspeech 2009. [pdf | slides]
• 2009. K. Evanini, S. Isard, and M. Liberman. Automatic formant extraction for sociolinguistic analysis of large corpora. Proc. Interspeech 2009. [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 written and found useful for my research. 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]
• extractFormants: a program for automatically obtaining vowel formant measurements; takes as input a speech audio file and a word- and phone-level transcription produced by forced alignment, outputs a set of formant measurements for each vowel in the audio file [download | README]