PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

David Mortensen

David Mortensen is a computational linguist whose work connects phonetic and typological knowledge with multilingual NLP and speech systems. He earned a linguistics PhD at UC Berkeley in 2006 and served as an assistant professor in Pittsburgh before joining Carnegie Mellon. PanPhon mapped IPA segments to articulatory features, URIEL and lang2vec represented language relationships as vectors, Epitran converted writing to IPA, and AlloVera supported speech recognition across languages. In 2024, he coauthored a review of emergent communication and a neural reconstruction paper that won an ACL Best Paper Award. He is an Associate Research Professor in CMU’s Language Technologies Institute and heads ChangeLing Lab.

Timeline

  1. 2006

    Berkeley PhD and Pittsburgh post

    He earns a PhD in linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2006. Before joining CMU, he serves as an assistant professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Linguistics.

  2. 2016

    PanPhon maps IPA sounds

    In 2016, he coauthors PanPhon, a database that maps more than 5,000 IPA segments to 21 subsegmental articulatory features and boosts named-entity-recognition performance.

  3. 2017

    URIEL and lang2vec vectors

    In 2017, he and his collaborators introduce URIEL and lang2vec, a knowledge base and utility that represent languages with typological, geographical, and phylogenetic vectors for multilingual NLP.

  4. 2018

    Epitran for many languages

    In 2018, he coauthors a paper introducing Epitran, a multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme system that converts written forms into IPA across many languages.

  5. 2020

    AlloVera and Allosaurus

    His 2020 AlloVera database maps phonemes to allophones across multiple languages and supports Allosaurus, a pretrained universal phone recognizer that can transcribe speech for more than 2,000 languages.

  6. 2024

    Reviewing emergent communication

    In 2024, he and Brendon Boldt coauthor a review of deep learning-based emergent communication. It surveys applications across machine learning, natural language processing, linguistics, and cognitive science.

  7. 2024

    Neural proto-language reconstruction

    He coauthors Semisupervised Neural Proto-Language Reconstruction with Liang Lu and Peirong Xie; the model uses a small labeled set and a larger unlabeled set of cognate data. The paper receives the 2024 ACL Best Paper Award.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate Research Professor at CMU

    He is an Associate Research Professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon and heads ChangeLing Lab.

Career

  1. NowCarnegie Mellon UniversityAssociate Research Professor
  2. University of PittsburghAssistant Professor

Education

  1. 2006University of California, BerkeleyPhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes David Mortensen. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of David Mortensen yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. People | STEDT stedt.johnblowe.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. David Mortensen - Language Technologies Institute - School of Computer Science - Carnegie Mellon University lti.cmu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. PanPhon: A Resource for Mapping IPA Segments to Articulatory Feature Vectors - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. URIEL and lang2vec: Representing languages as typological, geographical, and phylogenetic vectors - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. David R. Mortensen | Epitran cs.cmu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. David R. Mortensen | AlloVera cs.cmu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. [2407.03302] A Review of the Applications of Deep Learning-Based Emergent Communication arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Semisupervised Neural Proto-Language Reconstruction - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. News | ChangeLing Lab changelinglab.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. People | ChangeLing Lab changelinglab.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.