AriaRay Brown

  • Linguist
  • Designer
  • Developer

Welcome to my collection of creative puzzles and pursuits. Click the links below to explore projects, learn more about me, contact me with a message, or view my resume.

About

Hi! I'm a human who explores creativity, structure, determination, and connection through the roles of linguist, designer, and programmer.

Currently, I study computational linguistics in the master's program, Language Science and Technology, at Saarland University. I contribute to work in linguistics research & build software projects to answer questions about language and human-computer interaction. For a thrill to my curiosity, I inspect websites and marvel at the canvas of web-based experiences.

In other words: I study language as a phenomenal computation of human connectiveness, I design with attentive intention, and I code to solve puzzles (and have fun).

Publications

  • An Interactive Toolkit for Approachable NLP. Brown, A., Steuer, J., Mosbach, M., & Klakow, D. (2024, August). An Interactive Toolkit for Approachable NLP. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Teaching NLP (pp. 119-127). (Workshop: TeachNLP at ACL 2024). [pdf] [talk]
  • Apple Core-dination: Linguistic Feedback and Learning in a Speech-to-Action Shared World Game. Susann Boy, AriaRay Brown, and Morgan Wixted. (Workshop: InterNLP at ACL 2021) Interactive Learning for Natural Language Processing. [pdf] [demo] [code]

Project Samples

I've developed and collaborated on projects in software development and linguistic research, in the areas of: second-language learning, phonetic transcription, human-computer interaction, teaching natural language processing, multilingual corpus-building, spoken language models, and the interpretability of speech representations.

Phoneme-Based N-gram Language Identification

(2022) For this Python-based project, I built an n-gram-based language identification model to predict the language of IPA-transcribed utterances. This involved pre-processing training data for 11 languages (tedious but necessary and diversely insightful), programming functionality for automatic text-to-IPA transcription (truly a fun-ction ☺), and analyzing the phoneme frequency distributions across languages (an avenue of interest I would like to return to!).

More on this project can be viewed here: [phoneme-based-ngram on GitHub].

For Fun Artwork

Enjoy these designs while I add samples of projects to share.

(Click to view)

Skills

Language

  • Frenchadvanced
  • Germanbeginner-intermediate
  • Modern Standard Arabicnovice
  • Darijanovice

Design

  • Drawn and digital illustration/animation
  • PowerPoint
  • Photoshop
  • Preview
  • iMovie

Technical

  • Java, JavaScript, Python, C++, TypeScript, PHP, R
  • HTML, CSS
  • Angular, Spring Boot
  • MySQL, relational databases, ORM
  • Git, Terminal, MacOS
  • WordPress, Bootstrap, Thymeleaf
  • Flask
  • PyTorch, Scikit-learn, Hugging Face
  • Unit testing, usability testing
  • Text parsing

Linguistic

  • Praat
  • IPA

Experiential

  • Teaching, teaching technical skills
  • Design, writing, editing
  • Baking <insert plant-based desserts>

Contact

Hello! Feel free to send a message, ask a question, or teach me to decipher your non-English text.