Steven Bird
Visitor at Language Parties
Darwin, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteven Bird is a computational linguist and software researcher with 24 years’ experience building language technologies and supporting minoritised oral-language communities across Africa, Melanesia, Amazonia and Australia. He cofounded influential infrastructure for the field—NLTK, the ACL Anthology and the Open Language Archives Community—and has held academic and leadership roles at Edinburgh, Penn, Berkeley, Melbourne and Charles Darwin University, where he directs the Top End Language Lab. His work spans research, tools and data stewardship (including senior roles at the Linguistic Data Consortium and presidency of the ACL), and he remains an active open-source contributor to the NLTK project and its data indexes. Steven combines deep field experience in language documentation with practical software engineering—authoring a widely used NLP textbook and designing production-ready tools for language preservation. Quietly, his career mixes hands-on algorithm design (e.g., name-matching and annotation graph models) with community-led collaborations that prioritize Indigenous leadership and local impact.
25 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computational Linguistics, PhD, Computational Linguistics at The University of EdinburghThe University of Melbourne
English, French, kunwinjku (australian aboriginal language)
Stackoverflow
300reputation
9kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (8)
nlp10
wordnet10
python10
natural-language-processing10
xml9
nltk9
context-free-grammar6
github4
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
nltk/nltk_data
May 2012 - Jul 2022
NLTK Data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:229 commits, 67 PRs, 141 pushes in 10 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Steven primarily focused on updating the data index and package index for the NLTK data repository. Their work involved modifying the index.html and tools/build_pkg_index.py files, indicating a role in maintaining and generating the data listings and build processes. The updates involved updating the URLs of the data packages and correcting build scripts and overall structure.
nltknlpnatural-language-processingcorporalinguistics
nltk/nltk
Aug 2001 - Dec 2022
NLTK Source
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:24 reviews, 5068 commits, 933 PRs in 21 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Steven contributed to bug fixes, improvements, and clean-ups. Their work focused on the WordNet visualization functionality in the nltk.corpus.reader.wordnet module. The user added support for improved display in a few functions such as `wordnet.tree()` and `text.collocations`.
nltkpythonnlpnatural-language-processingmachine-learning
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