Dr Nathan White ~ Postdoctoral Research Associate

Dr Nathan M. White has worked for nearly a decade with the Hmong diaspora community with a focus on applied natural language processing-based methods of linguistic analysis of an under-documented, low-resource language with origins in Southeast Asia. As part of his PhD, he produced the Hmong Medical Corpus, a gold-standard biomedical corpus with an integrated AI-based question-answering system, which represents the first such system for a low-resource minority language.

Currently, Dr White is a postdoctoral researcher with continuing research in machine learning and fieldwork-based data acquisition and analysis, with a focus on developing novel computational methods of analysis for linguistics as well as developing AI-based language applications in a low-resource environment.

His ongoing activities include research and development for potentially commercialisable applications in the NLP space in areas as diverse as medical communication and sustainability.

Teaching

• AN2009: Anthropological Linguistics (Level 2; CNS)
• MA3831: Natural Language Processing, Web Scraping and Large Data Processing (Level 3; CNS & TSV)

Interests

Research

• Computational linguistics
• Natural language processing
• Machine learning
• Language documentation
• Multilingualism and language acquisition
• Speech signal processing
• Artificial intelligence applications for low-resource and minority languages
• Big data analytics

Experience

• 2021 to present - Postdoctoral Research Associate, James Cook University (Cairns, Australia)
• 2017 to 2021 - Research Scholar (PhD candidate), James Cook University (Cairns, Australia)
• 2015 to 2016 - Adjunct Instructor, Fresno Pacific University (Fresno, United States)

Research Disciplines

• Linguistics (4704)
• Artificial intelligence (4602)

Socio-Economic Objectives

• Expanding knowledge (2801)

Awards

• 2022 - Dean's Award for Excellence, JCU

Memberships

• 2022 - Program Committee Member, Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP) Workshop
• 2022 - Member, Australasian Language Technology Association
• 2022 - Board Member, Western Institute for Endangered Language Documentation
• 2022 - Associate Member, IEEE
• 2021 - Member, Australian Linguistic Society
• 2020 - Member, Association for Computational Linguistics

These are the most recent publications associated with this author. To see a detailed profile of all publications stored at JCU, visit ResearchOnline@JCU. Hover over Altmetrics badges to see social impact.

Journal Articles

• White N (2022) The Hmong Medical Corpus: a biomedical corpus for a minority language. Language Resources and Evaluation, 56. pp. 1315-1332
• White N (2021) Language and variety mixing in diasporic Hmong. Italian Journal of Linguistics/Rivista di Linguistica, 33 (1). pp. 157-180
• White N (2021) Grammaticalization and phonological reidentification in White Hmong. Studies in Language, 46 (1). pp. 258-284
• White N (2021) Prehistory of verbal markers in Hmong: what can we say? Studia Linguistica, 75 (2). pp. 345-374

Book Chapters

• Aikhenvald A, Dixon R and White N (2020) The essence of 'word'. In: Phonological word and grammatical word: a cross-linguistic typology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 1-24
• White N (2020) Word in Hmong. In: Phonological word and grammatical word: a cross-linguistic typology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K., pp. 213-259
• White N (2019) Classifiers in Hmong. In: Genders and Classifiers: A Cross-Linguistic Typology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 222-248

Other research outputs

• Aikhenvald A, Dixon R and White N (2020) Phonological word and grammatical word: a cross-linguistic typology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK