Siyu Liang

I am an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Rice University starting July 2026. I received my Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington, where I was 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 speech 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.

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

You can reach me at siyu.liang [@] rice [dot] edu.