David R. Mortensen
Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
5407 Gates Hillman Complex
Language Technologies Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
I am an Associate Research Professor in the Language Technologies Institute, which is part of Carnegie Mellon University’s Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science. Before coming to CMU, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh.
My work revolves around modeling and reasoning about language as a dynamic system, one that varies in time, social and geographic space, and modality. My central dictim is “language use is language change.” I model dynamic aspects of language, and leverage such aspects for practical applications, using current machine learning methods. Much of my current work involves training, evaluating, exploiting, and building upon foundation models and LLM agents.
Areas to which I have contributed:
- Multilingual and low-resource NLP
- Speech processing (especially phonetic speech models)
- Computational tools for speech assessment
- Computational phonology
- Computational morphology
- Evaluation of large language models (morphology and inductive reasoning)
- Computational historical linguistics
- Agents for reasoning and optimization tasks (especially in historical linguistics)
- Emergent language (emergent communication)
I did my graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, where I recieved a PhD in Linguistics for a thesis on theoretical phonology. At the same time, I was working on various computational projects relating to language documentation and comparative reconstruction. My current position allows me to bring my various interests together.
For more about me, see my curriculum vitae.
I lead ChangeLing Lab, a growing research group dedicated to language change and empirical linguistics.
news
| Sep 9, 2026 | Our papers “Generative Reconstruction of Pediatric Disordered Speech for Automated Clinical Evaluation,” “Quantifying Consonant Contributions to Word Intelligibility via Acoustic Masking,” “Phone Segmentation and Recognition through Phonological Activation Mapping” were accepted for presentation at IEEE SLT 2026. |
| Jul 20, 2026 | I delivered an invited talk entitled “The Reconstruction will not be Supervised” at Leipzig University. |
| Jul 1, 2026 | I was promoted to Associate Research Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Melloon university. |
| Jun 1, 2026 | Our papers “An Empirical Recipe for Universal Phone Recognition,” “Adapting Self-Supervised Speech Representations for Cross-Lingual Dysarthria Detection in Parkinson’s Disease,” and “Scaling Self-Supervised Speech Models Uncovers Deep Linguistic Relationships: Evidence from the Pacific Cluster” were accepted to Interspeech 2026. |
| May 1, 2026 | I and my colleages had three papers accepted to the ACL main sessions and two papers accepted to Finding of the ACL. |