Siyu Liang

💼 3940 Benton Ln NE, Room 407, Seattle, WA, USA

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📷 in Kiama, Australia

August 2025

I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington advised by Drs. Gina-Anne Levow and Richard Wright. My research develops computational methods for multilingual and under-resourced speech grounded in linguistic theory and fairness.

I study how large speech language models represent and generalize across phonetic and structural variation, and design methods to evaluate and improve their performance across resource levels and dialectal variation. As a linguist, I am particularly interested in studying speech variation through both lab phonology and corpus-based approaches. I am also interested in how computational approaches can be applied to linguistic analysis and documentation, and I have worked on Iranian, Tibeto-Burman, Turkic, Nilotic, and areally Southeast Asian languages. I actively conduct fieldwork and collaborate with field linguists to build models and resources in real-world documentation settings.

When I’m not working, you can find me on red-eye flights ✈️, at concerts 🎶, in the mountains 🏞️, and occasionally up the wall 🧗 or under the sea 🤿.

You can reach me at liangsy [@] uw [dot] edu.

news

Sep 29, 2025 I will be visiting the ALTAE lab at Université Paris Cité from November to December 2025. Feel free to reach out!
Sep 18, 2025 1 paper accepted to EMNLP 2025 (main). See you in Suzhou!
Aug 06, 2025 Presented my work on the acoustics of performed sexual orientation in Thai at NWAV-AP 8 in Singapore. It was a lot of fun!.