I graduated from The Ohio State University.
I studied Linguistics with a specialization
in Computational Linguistics, also Spanish
with a specialization in Hispanic Linguistics,
with a minor in Speech and Hearing Sciences.
I was always interested in language, how language
works.
When I was a child, my family speaks Spanish,
Garifuna and English of course.
And then I started learning Portuguese in
the fifth grade and Japanese in the sixth.
And my thing was the more languages you know,
the more people you can communicate with and
create understanding with.
I'm going to be involved in natural language
processing in low resource languages.
So, what that means is that languages that
are not widely known, I would like to be able
to create voice applications for Amazon Alexa
and Google assistant for the Garifuna language.
I imagine a future where I can say, “Hey
Alexa, and please speak to me in Garifuna.
Tell my child a story in the language of my
people.”
Right now, you can't really do that because
Alexa and Google are focused on languages
like English, Spanish, Portuguese, the big,
widely-known languages that have data, corporate
data already out there.
