Bringing real-world data to bear in addressing distribution shifts: a sociolinguistically-informed analysis of ASR errors

Alicia Beckford Wassink is a professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of Washington, and directs the Sociolinguistics Laboratory. She currently serves on the executive committees of both the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society. Wassink's research interests lie in the sociophonetic analysis of the production and perception of time-varying features speech (vowel systems in particular), the linguistic outcomes of interethnic contact, racial bias in automatic speech recognition, and social network modeling. Her work appears in the Wiley Encyclopedia of World Englishes, as well as books on Language and Identity (Edinburgh University Press), African-American Women’s Language (Oxford), Best Practices in Sociophonetics (Routledge), and Language in the Schools (Elsevier). Primary reports of her research have appeared in Speech Communication, the Publications of the American Dialect Society, American Speech, Journal of The Acoustical Society of America, Journal of Phonetics, Language in Society, Language Variation and Change, Journal of English Linguistics, and the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.