Before joining Google as a research scientist in May, 2013, I was a faculty member for 9 years in the Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU) at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) – part of what used to be the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI).  Before that, I was in the Speech Algorithms Department at AT&T Labs - Research from 2001 – 2004. I finished my Ph.D. in the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University in 2001. There I was part of the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing.

I am a computational linguist working on various topics in natural language processing. My research interests include: transliteration and text normalization; language identification; language modeling for automatic speech recognition, text entry and other applications; weighted transducers and grammars; supervised and unsupervised learning of language models; pronunciation modeling; text entry, accessibility and augmentative & alternative communication (AAC); syntactic parsing of text and speech; statistical models of human language processing; spoken language processing for diagnosis of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders.

Some recent-ish activities, links and/or resources:

• Richard Sproat, Su-Youn Yoon and I have a new book coming out in late 2025: Tools of the Scribe: How Writing Systems, Technology, and Human Factors Interact To Affect the Act of Writing.
• I gave a talk on "Empirical methods in context-aware transliteration" at the Eugene Charniak Memorial Symposium at the CS Deptartment of Brown University in November, 2024.
• I co-organized (w/Kyle Gorman, Emily Prud’hommeaux and Richard Sproat) the Second Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL 2024), held in conjunction with LREC-COLING in Torino, Italy, May 21, 2024. The workshop was sponsored by the newly-formed ACL Special Interest Group on Writing Systems and Written Language (SIGWrit), which I helped establish in 2023. The previous year, we organized the First ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL), which was held at ACL 2023 in Toronto, July 14, 2023.
• I was co-Editor-in-chief for the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) from 2018-2022. The journal's 2021 impact factor was the topic of an MIT Press blog post.
• Here's the site of the Dakshina dataset, an open-source collection of romanized and native script Wikipedia in 12 South Asian languages that I helped put together.
• Here's a 2021 Google Research blog post about some work my team was involved in, transliterating geo entity names into Brahmic scripts. And here's an earlier (2017) post about some related work I contributed to, providing transliteration keyboards in 20+ South Asian languages.

A few recent papers:

• Adrian Benton, Alexander Gutkin, Christo Kirov and Brian Roark. 2025. Improving Informally Romanized Language Identification. To appear in Proceedings of EMNLP. preprint
• Christo Kirov, Cibu Johny, Anna Katanova, Alexander Gutkin and Brian Roark. 2024. Context-aware transliteration of Romanized South Asian languages. Computational Linguistics, 50(2): 475–534.
• Elizabeth Nielsen, Christo Kirov and Brian Roark. 2023. Spelling convention sensitivity in neural language models. In Findings of EACL, pp. 1304–1316.

Other publications;    Google Scholar profile;    Google Research page;    Semantic Scholar page;    CV.