Diversity of English and Linguistic Bias

Alicia Beckford Wassink, Professor of Linguistics and Director of the UWSociolinguistics Lab, studies attitudes toward varieties of English and their discriminatory implications. She is particularly interested in racial bias in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, which train models on natural speech primarily belonging to speakers of Standard American English. Wassink explores the biases that emerge when this technology ignores the vast diversity of English dialects––many of which are spoken by minoritized groups. With funding from the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund and participation in I-Corps, she uses her sociolinguistic work in pursuit of social justice.