Mark Liberman

Prof Mark Liberman

As a researcher and research manager at AT&T Bell Labs from 1975-1990, as a member of Penn’s faculty since 1990, and as founder and director of the Linguistic Data Consortium since 1992, Liberman has participated actively in the evolution of speech and language research towards a model of quantitative, replicable studies based on well-defined datasets. The LDC has distributed more than 220,00 copies of more than 3,000 datasets to more than 6,000 research organizations in more than 100 countries. The availability of such datasets has been a key enabler of progress in applications such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, document retrieval, and information extraction. Liberman's own research has touched on all of those areas, as well as the use of such technologies in empirical research on human speech, language, and communication. In recent years, he has been especially focused on clinical and educational applications.