/wdwg
{
/about me
hi! I am a fourth-year Linguistics PhD candidate at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (USA), where I got my Master's in Linguistics as well as my Cognitive Science and Data Science graduate certificates. Before Michigan, I did my Bachelor’s of Secondary Education (English) at De La Salle University in the Philippines and my Master's in English Language and Linguistics at the National University of Singapore.
!
/as a linguist
I am a sociolinguist specializing in language variation, change, language contact, documentation in the context of multilingualism. I am particularly interested in the interaction between society and language in the Philippine and wider Southeast Asian context. To help me answer my research questions, I employ corpus-based, experimental, ethnographic and computational techniques on diverse datasets, including natural speech data and social media data. I work on Sino-Philippine languages such as Lánnang-uè and other Southeast Asian languages such as Colloquial Singapore English or 'Singlish'.
/recent publications
2022
Hybridization
Philippine English
Development, Structure, and Sociology of English in the Philippines (Routledge)
2021
Filipino, Chinese, neither, or both? The Lannang identity and its relationship with language.
Language & Communication (Elsevier)
2020
Vowel system or vowel systems? Variation in the monophthongs of Philippine Hybrid Hokkien in Manila
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (John Benjamins)
2022
'Is it' in Colloquial Singapore English: What variation can tell us about its conventions and development (accepted)
English Today (Cambridge University Press)
2021
Interactions of Sinitic languages in the Philippines: Sinicization, Filipinization, and Sino-Philippine language creation
The Palgrave Handbook of Chinese Language Studies (Palgrave-MacMillan)
2020
Two Englishes diverged in the Philippines? A substratist account of Manila Chinese English
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (John Benjamins)
/projects
Corpus of Philippine Englishes
Sino-Philippine Language Map
Using Machine Learning to Improve Readmission Prediction in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia
Corpus of Singapore English Messaging (CoSEM) project
My Language, My Heritage: A grassroots Sino-Philippine language documentation initiative
>
/as an engineer
I collaborated with and led two cross-functional teams – the Alzheimer’s Disease Machine Learning team at the Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation at the University of Michigan, and the Natural Language Processing team of Digital Alpha Technologies headquartered in New York. I develop corpus-making and analysis programs using machine learning and computational methods.
>
/tools
Corpus of Philippine Englishes-Twitter Component Corpus Suite (Python)
An application that compiles
and preprocesses COPE, allows for data querying, which is used to subset the corpus. Includes sociolinguistic demographic prediction support using Deep Learning with Wang et al’s 2019 M3 application
2021
SubCorp (Python)
A tool that creates a tagged (sociolinguistic) corpus based on SRT files from YouTube
2021
TweetCorp (Python)
A wrapper application that, from a simple query GUI interface, scrapes, preprocesses, and tokenizes Twitter tweets by sentence using a mix of rule-based and neural network splitting algorithms before compiling them into a CSV corpus file. Includes sociolinguistic demographic prediction support using Deep Learning with Wang et al’s 2019 M3 application
2021
EasyYTGet (Python)
A free application that automatically downloads videos and audios given a list of links or a link
2021
SpeechSuite (Python)
An application that uses speech detection, segmentation, LSTM-based network embedding, and spectral clustering to transcribe, diarize, and tag American English audio. Under development: Support for Philippine English and Filipino
2021
CorpTool (Python)
An application that uses machine learning models (e.g., Conditional Random Fields) to automatically tag corpora of under-documented languages for part-of-speech
2020
/affiliations
#
/as a teacher
I have taught and mentored students in the Philippines, Singapore, and the United States. In my home country the Philippines, I am a licensed professional teacher. I placed 6th out of 53,090 exam takers overall, and 1st in English.
/awards
The Deborah Keller-Cohen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
University of Michigan
2021
Graduate Students’ Teaching Award (GSTA)
National University of Singapore
2018
The Braj B. Kachru Student Award
23rd International Association of World Englishes (IAWE) Conference, International Association for World Englishes
2018
Distinction Award (Rank 1 - English specialization, Rank 6 - overall, 53,090)
Professional Regulation Commission, Manila, the Philippines
2016
Eduardo Cojuanco, Jr. Award for Teaching Innovation
De La Salle University
2016
Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award
De La Salle University
2016
Jose Rizal Award – Jose Rizal Honors Society
De La Salle University
2016
