Open to Cornell community. Reception to follow outside room.

Abstract: African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is by far the most studied variety of American English, yet most non-linguists either ignore or deny it, or notice it only when it is the source of national controversies in education, as it was in the 1996 Oakland Ebonics firestorm. Recently, however, it became an issue of concern when Koenecke et al (2020) showed that the Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) systems used by Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft had on average twice as many errors when transcribing the speech of black speakers as they did when transcribing the speech of white speakers.

In this talk, Professor Rickford will discuss what AAVE is and explain some of the challenges its pronunciation and grammar represent for the ASRs of Apple and other systems.  From there, examples will be shared of actual speech snippets used to test the ASRs of Apple and other systems, illustrating some of the specific difficulties they caused.  There will also be introduced limited evidence of difficulties that ASRs faced with Latino English and discuss possible solutions to these recurrent limitations with ASR devices.

About John Rickford
John Rickford is a leading sociolinguist and world-renowned expert on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and the study of linguistic variation and change.  He is considered one of the towering figures in the linguistic and historical study of vernacular language in the African diaspora.

Rickford is Professor of Linguistics emeritus and the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Education (by courtesy), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University.  He was named as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large (ADW-PAL) at Cornell University in 2017. His appointment runs through 2023. This event is part of an ADW-PAL mini visit and is cosponsored by the Department of Linguistics.

Among his numerous honors, Rickford was the President of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) from 2015-2016, from which he was recently awarded the best paper in Language 2016 Award.  Since 2017, Rickford has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021. And in 2022, he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.