About Me

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor[?] in the University of California San Diego Linguistics Department, specializing in teaching, as well as in computational and quantitative approaches to phonetics and language.

Teaching

As a teaching-focused faculty member here at UCSD, and I truly love sharing the joy (and pain) of Language with students of all levels. I’m also the author of Using Praat for Linguistic Research, a free textbook on phonetic analysis with the Praat software suite, and am currently writing Using Unix for Linguistic Research, a guide to the Unix command line written with linguistic needs in mind. I hope to continue developing more of these sorts of open course materials as I progress in my work. For a complete list of courses taught, please see my C.V.. If you’re curious what a “teaching professor” even is, read my teaching professor FAQ. And if you’re curious what my students have been up to, check my bragging about my students page. I’ve also compiled a page of resources for my students which might be of some help.

Research

My research specialization is in computational approaches to linguistics, specifically in acoustic phonetics, speech perception, and natural language processing. I enjoy using computer modeling and machine learning to better understand how humans produce, perceive, and understand language. My main focus has been on the perception of vowel quality and vowel nasality in the face of limited context and high variability, but I’m also interested in natural language processing and other forms of extracting meaningful linguistic signal from noise.

As side projects, I’m the author of a large repository of Praat scripts, the maintainer of the EnronSent email corpus, and the (occasional) writer of language articles, most of which are posted here. If you have questions about any of these things, please do send me an email. In my free time, I write and share terrible puns, study and appreciate industrial design, work with computers and open-source software, and attend to all creatures small and fuzzy.

Please feel free to use the navigation links at the top of this page for more information about me and my work, and have a wonderful day.

Spring 2020 General Zoffice Hours: Tuesdays 1-3pm or by appointment. All office hours in Spring 2020 will be held using Zoom.

Contact Email: wstyler is the username of a person who works at ucsd.edu

Campus Office: AP&M Building 4151 (Plus Code: 8544VQH5+MM5)

Zoom Address: https://ucsd.zoom.us/my/wstyler

Campus Mailing Address:

Will Styler

Department of Linguistics

9500 Gilman Drive MC0108

Univ. of California, San Diego

La Jolla, CA 92093-0108

I respectfully acknowledge that I live and work on unceded territory of the Kumeyaay Nation.

Why savethevowels.org?

Because if you don’t save them, who will?!