Austin Jones

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Ph.D. Candidate
Graduate Research Assistant

I'm a PhD Candidate studying the intersection of corpus phonetics, machine learning, and phonology. At heart, I'm an acoustic phonetician with an interest in improving our models of speech production. Through study of social and linguistic variables, we can identify stable patterns of variation relevant to computational goals like statistical modeling, automatic speech recognition, and the creation of linguistic corpora. However, these patterns of variation prove difficult to capture at scale when the computational tools used are inflexible or unavailable like in a low-resource language context. My research concerns ways in which machine learning can aid in the detection of variation in order to capture phonetic and phonological patterns.

Education:

PhD in Linguistics - University of Georgia (in progress)

MA in Linguistics and English Language Teaching - University of Leeds

BA in Linguistics - University of Georgia

AA in Foreign Language (Spanish) - Middle Georgia State College

 

 

 

Areas of Interest:
Computational Linguistics
Corpus Methods
Phonetics and Phonology
Sociolinguistics and Language Variation
Selected Publications:
Jones, A., Hale, J., Renwick, M. E., Vrzic, Z., & Langston, K. (2024). Comparing Kaldi-Based Pipeline Elpis and Whisper for ˇCakavian Transcription. In Field Matters. The Third Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics (p. 61). 10.18653/v1/2024.fieldmatters-1.8
 
Tadavarthy, H. V., Jones, A., & Renwick, M. E (2024). Phonological Feature Detection for US English using the Phonet Library. In Proc. Interspeech 2024. https://doi.org/10.21437/interspeech.2024-318 

Jones, A., & Renwick, M. E. (2024). Evaluating Italian Vowel Variation with the Recurrent Neural Network Phonet. In Proc. Interspeech 2024. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2024-317 

Miller, S. E., Brailey-Jones, A., & Renwick, M. E. (2022). Postlexical palatalization of /d/ across word boundaries in UK English. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (Vol. 50, No. 1). AIP Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0001736

Conference Presentations and Posters:

“Neural network analysis of phonological variation across Istro-Venetian fricatives” with Austin Jones, Margaret Renwick, Zvjezdana Vrzić, Massimo Daul, and Keith Langston. Poster presentation at the 190th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Philadelphia, PA. May 2026. [abstract 2pSC31, pg. 161]

“Forced Alignment of Istro-Venetian Speech via Neural vs. Non-Neural Models” with Austin Jones, Massimo Daul, Margaret Renwick, Zvjezdana Vrzić, John Hale, and Keith Langston. Poster presentation at the 190th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Philadelphia, PA. May 2026. [abstract 2pSC30, pg. 161]

“Exploring Lexical Variation of Italian Mid Vowel Targets using the Neural Network Phonet.” Poster with Austin Jones and Margaret Renwick at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2025). Berkeley, California. September 2025. [program]

"Comparing palatalization of /t,d/ across word boundaries in UK English" with Sara E. Miller, Austin Brailey-Jones, and Margaret Renwick. Oral presentation at the 90th Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL). Oxford, MS. March 9 – 11, 2023.

"Palatalization of /d/ across word boundaries in UK English" with Sara E. Miller, Austin Brailey-Jones, and Margaret Renwick. Poster presentation at the 183rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Nashville, TN. December 5 – 9, 2022. [poster] 

Awards and Special Recognitions:

2025-2026 Wilson Center Graduate Research Award for research into phonetic and phonological variation in endangered, low-resource languages using neural networks

UGA AI Research Day 2022 - Best Poster Award for Application of Deep Learning to the Classification of Palatalized [t] in UK English.

 

Courses Taught:
LING 2100
LING 2100E
Articles Featuring Austin Jones
"Comparing Kandi-Based Pipeline Elpis and Whisper for Cakavian Transcription" Title Card

Summer Recap: “Endangered Languages in Contact in Isria and Kvarner, Coratia (ELIC)”

As part of Dr. Keith Langston’s NSF grant, this summer some faculty and graduate students collaborated and presented on their project “Endangered Languages in Contact in Istria and Kvarner, Croatia (ELIC)” at two different conferences.

 

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Contact Information

adj10085@uga.edu
Office: Gilbert 120A

Other Information


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