| Richard William Sproat | |
| Fields: | Computational linguistics |
| Workplaces: | Google (2012 - present) |
| Alma Mater: | University of California, San Diego (B.A., 1981) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1985) |
| Thesis Title: | On Deriving the Lexicon |
| Thesis Url: | http://mitwpl.mit.edu/catalog/spro01 |
| Thesis Year: | 1985 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Ken Hale |
Richard Sproat is a computational linguist currently working for as a research scientist. Prior to joining Sakana AI, Sproat worked for Google between 2012 and 2024 on text normalization[1] and speech recognition.
Sproat graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, under the supervision of Kenneth L. Hale.[2] His PhD thesis is one of the earliest work that derives morphosyntactically complex forms from the module which produces the phonological form that realizes these morpho-syntactic expressions, one of the core ideas in Distributed Morphology.[3]
One of Sproat's main contributions to computational linguistics is in the field of text normalization, where his work with colleagues in 2001, Normalization of non-standard words,[4] was considered a seminal work in formalizing this component of speech synthesis systems.He has also worked on computational morphology[5] and the computational analysis of writing systems.[6]