Damian Romero, Computational Hispanic Linguist

Talks and Conferences

LAEL-PG 15. Wei Xu, Maria Laura Viale, Hui Wang, Peiwen Su, Hanyu Jia, and myself participated at the 15th Annual Linguistics and English Language Postgraduate Conference (LAEL-PG) in Lancaster University, 23-24 July. You can find the abstract here. I will publish the proceedings article when it gets published.
WCCFL 2021 @UArizona. Lead Tech Coordinator at the 31st West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 39) entirely online. You can find more information about the conference as well as the recorded keynote talks at: https://sites.google.com/view/wccfl2021/. Here is Noam Chomsky’s talk, which I had the opportunity to help streaming:

We are currently recruiting participants for the MCEC Project. Here is our official recruitment video for Fall20 video.

Graduate Work on NLP. As of 08/21 I started working as a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Arizona for Dr. Tracy Crane (University of Miami) and Dr. Steven Bethard (NIH Grant Project #1R21CA256680-01). We use Natural Language Processing to determine predictors of healthy diet and physical activity behavior change in ovarian cancer survivors.
Internship. I have been a Machine Learning Intern at ExplosionAI since May 2021 and will continue until I turn in my dissertation in Spring 2022.

New Sample Dataset. The MCEC team led by myself and SLAT Ph.D. student Hanyu Jia just published the following sample dataset of UA academic emails: https://doi.org/10.25422/azu.data.14259785
Copyright First Responder. In Spring 2021 I joined the USA national Copyright First Responders (CFR) network. I am happy to have met CFR creator and one of my favorite people in the planet, Kyle K. Courtney, copyright advisor at Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication.
- As a CFR person, I am committed to empowering communities about their special role in copyright law, bust copyright myths, and allow greater understanding of decision making.
50 Open Access Linguistic Presentations. I led the Open Access (OA) publication of 50 linguistic presentation resources in our Research Data repository: https://new.library.arizona.edu/news/library-data-specialists-amplify-student-research-discoveries
I designed new Google Slides templates for UArizona folks:
- Department of linguistics
- Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Here is my octocat:

You can make your own at: https://myoctocat.com/

Spring/2020 - The MCEC Team recently participated in the 19th SLAT Roundtable with the presentation: Multilingual College Email Corpus (MCEC) Project.
Fall/2020 - Spring/2021. I worked as a Graduate Assistant doing software development, data curation, and outreach under the supervision of Dr. Fernando Rios. During this time, I was able to help in the creation and maintenance of the University of Arizona’s open-access platform for research data and alternative scholarly outputs, the Research Data Repository (ReDATA). I was able to learn about open science, the FAIR principles, copyright, and all the hard work that goes behind creating a university-wide online service.
Summer/2020 - I participated in the University of Arizona L2 Digital Literacies Symposium Panel]: Online Education during Times of Crisis: Challenges of Teaching during COVID-19 (See video below)