Daniel Galbraith

Linguist

Google

Biography

I’m a Linguist at Google. I enjoy working on cutting-edge NLP and all kinds of problems involving human language. I graduated from Stanford with a PhD in Linguistics (2018). I am excited about applying deep knowledge of how language works to useful projects in the tech industry.

I spent the last several years dedicated to human language research, developing a new approach to syntax. During PhD, I sourced, annotated and analysed large quantities of new linguistic data, using statistical and computational methods. You can see machine learning projects and research tools I built at my Github.

Interests

NLP / Computational Linguistics
Artificial Intelligence
Syntax & Phonology

Education

PhD in Linguistics, 2018
Stanford University
MPhil in Linguistics, 2013
University of Cambridge
BA in Modern & Medieval Languages, 2012
University of Cambridge

Experience

Linguist

Google

Jul 2021 – Present Mountain View, CA

Cross-functional work in Ads and Human Computation.

Research Scientist

Amazon Lab126

May 2020 – Jul 2021 Sunnyvale, CA

Research and development of NLP for Alexa for Halo (fitness band).

NLP Scientist

Mosaix

Nov 2018 – Apr 2020 Palo Alto, CA

Research and development of NLU engine for multi-language voice assistance.

Computational Linguist

Apple (via Welocalize)

Jul 2018 – Oct 2018 Cupertino, CA

Write daily patches & software updates for Siri speech recognition and text-to-speech.

Graduate Research Assistant & Teaching Assistant

Stanford University

Sep 2013 – Jul 2018 Stanford, CA

Linguistics research on syntax and metrical phonology with advisor Paul Kiparsky.

Posts

Last updated on Nov 5, 2019

Better Linguistics for Better Voice Assistance

How we use linguistics to advance multilingual NLU.

Last updated on Nov 10, 2019

What Faroese ballads and US presidential speeches have in common

Rhythm — or for linguists, a testing ground for phonological theory.

Featured Publications

Meter, prosody and performance: evidence from the Faroese ballads

In this paper, I argue that the folk ballad tradition of the Faroe Islands, to date never examined in detail by metrists, offers …

Daniel Galbraith

DOI

The Predictable Case of Faroese

This thesis concerns case-marking phenomena in Icelandic and Faroese. I argue that the best approach to case distinguishes the levels …

Daniel Galbraith

PDF

Sentence stress in presidential speeches

Sentential prominence is not represented in writing, it is hard to measure phonetically, and it is highly variable, yet it undoubtedly …

Arto Anttila, Timothy Dozat, Daniel Galbraith, Naomi Shapiro

PDF

Universal Dependencies 1.2

Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with …

Joakim Nivre, […], Daniel Galbraith, […], et al.

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All Publications

Daniel Galbraith (2019). Meter, prosody and performance: evidence from the Faroese ballads. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 1–35.

DOI

Daniel Galbraith (2018). The Predictable Case of Faroese. PhD thesis, Stanford University.

PDF

Arto Anttila, Timothy Dozat, Daniel Galbraith, Naomi Shapiro (2018). Sentence stress in presidential speeches. Prosody in Syntactic Encoding, Linguistische Arbeiten 573, ed. Gerrit Kentner and Joost Kremers.

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Daniel Galbraith (2016). A constraint-based account of Faroese ballad meter. NordMetrik: Versification, Metrics in Practice. University of Helsinki, 5/25/16-5/27/16.

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Daniel Galbraith (2016). Faroese ballad meter: a constraint-based approach. LSA 90. Washington, DC, 1/8/16.

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Joakim Nivre, […], Daniel Galbraith, […], et al. (2015). Universal Dependencies 1.2.

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Daniel Galbraith (2013). Positional and Morphological Case in Faroese. Master’s thesis, University of Cambridge.