Richard Sproat
Research Scientist at Sakana AI
Greater Tokyo Area Japan
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolRichard Sproat is a research scientist with a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT and over three decades of interdisciplinary experience spanning industry and academia, including long tenures at Bell Labs, AT&T, the University of Illinois, OHSU, Google, and currently Sakana.ai. He combines deep expertise in phonetics, morphology, writing systems, and text-to-speech with practical work on multilingual text normalization, neural methods for ASR, transliteration, and child language assessment tools. An author of books on symbols and writing systems, he brings a historical and human-centered perspective to modern computational problems and a knack for spotting how script design and technology interact. Notably, he co-created the early text-to-scene system WordsEye, signaling a long-standing interest in multimodal language interfaces long before recent generative-AI waves.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Linguistics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Linguistics at MITUniversity of California, San Diego
Github Skills (13)
datasets6
natural-language-processing5
language-processing5
nlp5
nltk4
spelling2
thai2
phonetics2
linguistics1
bag-of-words1
wordnet1
database1
text-processing1
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
rwsproat/text-normalization-data
Jan 2017 - Jul 2021
Contributions:13 commits, 12 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 6 months
google/sparrowhawk
Oct 2015 - Jun 2018
Contributions:13 commits, 8 pushes in 2 years 8 months
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