Resume
William T. Reynolds
117 B 12th
Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98122
(206) 223-0989 (home)
(206) 367-7741 (work)
e-mail: breynolds72@hotmail.com
Employment
History:
2001–present Computational Linguist, Sprex,
Inc.. Since August 2001 I have worked
as a linguist and software development engineer for this small startup company. My major accomplishments have included doing
field research and Java and HTML coding to enhance Sprex’s language learning
software (“Teachionary”) by updating existing languages and adding new
languages (most recently Pashto); writing code and Perl scripts to enable
speech recognition over the internet; and taking charge of all aspects of
Sprex’s lip-synchronization software.
2001 Computational Linguist,
Conversay, Inc. I was employed for
three months as a computational linguist in charge of linguistic
verification. I was the first (and
only) linguistic tester at this company and designed automated procedures
(using Perl) for testing and reporting text processing bugs in Korean, German,
and British and American English.
1999–2001 Software Test Engineer, Microsoft
Corp. As the lead linguistic test engineer
for Microsoft’s text-to-speech engine. I was responsible for all linguistic
testing in the engine’s front end, including text normalization, sentence and
word breaking, the lexicon, homograph disambiguation, letter-to-sound rules,
and prosody. I designed and implemented
scripts for automated testing in these areas and reported bugs. I also served as linguistic advisor to the
development team and taught a course in introductory linguistics to the entire
speech group.
1997–1999 Research Linguist, Eloquent
Technology, Inc. In this position I was
responsible for such areas of text-to-speech processing as intonation,
grammatical category assignment, homograph disambiguation, and general
phonological and morphological rules. I
worked chiefly on English, French, and German, and was the coordinator for both
American and British English. I was
also responsible for testing and script writing for all languages.
1994–1997 Lecturer, University of the
Witwatersrand Department of Linguistics.
I taught undergraduate courses in phonology, sociolinguistics,
historical linguistics, and phonetics, and Honours courses in phonology and
sociolinguistics. I also served as
supervisor for a Master’s degree candidate, designed curricula, oversaw
teaching assistants, and served on various university committees.
1993–1994 Assistant, Graduate Instructor, and
Manager of the Phonetics Laboratory, Swarthmore College Linguistics
Department. Duties included general
office work, advising students, and running the phonetics lab, as well as
teaching an advanced course in theoretical phonology.
1992–1993 Graduate Lecturer, University of
Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics.
As a graduate student, I taught two courses at the University of Pennsylvania,
one in introductory linguistics and one in English grammar and composition.
Education:
1990–1994 Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of
Pennsylvania
Dissertation: Variation and Phonological Theory (December 1994)
1972–1976 B.A. in Linguistics, Haverford
College
My research interests include phonological and morphological theory,
American dialects, and quantitative sociolinguistic and phonetic analysis, with
an emphasis on Germanic languages in general and English in particular. I am fluent in German and have a good
reading knowledge of Dutch, Spanish, and Afrikaans. In addition, I have a working familiarity with such diverse languages
as French, Italian, Czech, Maori, Chuvash, Korean, Pashto, Zulu, and Venda.
A detailed list of my publications and talks, as well as a description
of the courses I have taught, is available upon request.