Hello, my name is Jackson Liscombe.  I was born and raised in Arroyo Grande, California, which is in the heart of California's “Central Coast.”

I entered higher education as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB).  After a brief stint as an Environment Science major, by chance I enrolled in an introductory Linguistics class and become fascinated with with idea that something so intuitive---and yet so seemingly haphazard---as human language could be studied in such intricate and illuminating ways.  I switched majors and, in 1999, obtained my bachelor's degree in Theoretical Linguistics.  My one motivation upon graduation was to get a job where I could actually use my degree.  As luck would have it, at the time Panasonic had a speech technology lab in Santa Barbara and I went to work on speech synthesis and speech recognition projects.  By and large, the approach to linguistics at USCB is a functional and corpus-based one, meaning that I was exposed to the study of language as it is used in everyday life and, therefore, was taken with the approach of the speech technology community that almost exclusively relies on corpora to build applications.  Though I am aware that many linguists find it displeasing that most approaches in the speech technology community flagrantly disregard linguistic theory for purely statistical analyses, I was actually quite fascinated by the observation that simple ways of counting things often outperform models built with elaborately hand-constructed grammars based on advanced linguistic theory.  Also, I was surprised to learn that I truly enjoy building software applications that allow humans to interact with machines as they do with other humans, using natural language.

After a few years at Panasonic, I decided to apply to graduate school and, in 2002, I entered the Ph.D. track in the Natural Language Processing Group in the Computer Science department at Columbia University in New York City.  (Links to all my relavent Columbia affiliations can be found in the contact section.)  This website is meant to showcase the research that I have done over the past five years with my wonderful adivsor Julia Hirschberg and other capable researchers in industrial research intuitions, including AT&T, IBM, ETS, and SpeechCycle.

I successfully defended my dissertation—Prosody and Speaker State: Paralinguistics, Pragmatics, and Proficiency—in June, 2007 and am currently working as a speech scientist at SpeechCycle in New York City.