PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Sharon Goldwater

Sharon Goldwater is a professor at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, where her research aims to discover how humans and machines learn linguistic structure. She worked as a researcher at SRI International from 1998 to 2000 before starting a PhD at Brown University under Mark Johnson. In 2009 she published a study of the effects of context on word segmentation in the journal Cognition. She won the 2016 Roger Needham Award from the British Computer Society. A 2019 NAACL paper she co-wrote argued that pretraining on high-resource speech recognition improves low-resource speech-to-text translation.

Timeline

  1. 1998–2000

    A researcher at SRI

    She works as a researcher at SRI International from 1998 to 2000, then starts her PhD at Brown University under Mark Johnson.

  2. 2009

    A Bayesian framework for word segmentation

    In 2009 she publishes a study of the effects of context on word segmentation in the journal Cognition.

  3. 2014–2020

    EACL program and board chair

    She serves as program chair for the 2014 Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), then chairs its governing board from 2019 to 2020.

  4. 2016

    A Roger Needham Award

    She wins the 2016 Roger Needham Award from the British Computer Society.

  5. 2017

    Speech-to-text translation without speech recognition

    With Sameer Bansal, Herman Kamper and Adam Lopez, she publishes a short paper at EACL 2017 on speech-to-text translation without speech recognition.

  6. 2019

    Pretraining for speech translation

    In 2019 she co-writes a NAACL paper arguing that pretraining on high-resource speech recognition improves low-resource speech-to-text translation.

  7. As of October 2026

    Professor at Edinburgh

    She is a professor in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, where her research aims to discover how humans and machines learn linguistic structure.

Sources and credits

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  1. Sharon Goldwater - University of Edinburgh Research Explorer research.ed.ac.uk. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. A Bayesian framework for word segmentation: exploring the effects of context - Macquarie University researchers.mq.edu.au. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Sharon Goldwater: Research homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Towards speech-to-text translation without speech recognition - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Pre-training on high-resource speech recognition improves low-resource speech-to-text translation - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Sharon Goldwater's Home Page homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk. Checked 14 October 2026.