Rate My Professor Steven Bird

Steven Bird is Professor Steven Bird in Linguistics at Charles Darwin University, serving in the Faculty of Arts and Society’s Northern Institute since 2017 as a research professor. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, awarded on 31 January 1991. Previously, he held academic appointments at the University of Edinburgh, University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Melbourne. Over the past three decades, Bird has collaborated with minoritised people groups across Africa, Melanesia, Amazonia, and Australia, investigating ways to sustain oral languages and cultures. He is renowned for establishing foundational resources in computational linguistics: the ACL Anthology, the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC), and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Additionally, he served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Bird directs the Top End Language Lab at Charles Darwin University, where he works with Indigenous leaders on projects addressing language maintenance and revitalisation amid Australia’s Top End linguistic diversity, including dozens of endangered Aboriginal languages. His research encompasses natural language processing, speech and language processing, deep learning, participatory design, intercultural communication, climate communication, and storytelling in Indigenous languages. Key grants include ARC Discovery Project DP210100228 "Investing in Aboriginal Languages" (Principal Investigator, 2021–2026) and DP240101952 "First Nations AI: Country, Climate, Communication" (Co-Investigator, 2024–2027). Selected publications feature "Must NLP be Extractive?" (2024, Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics), "Centering the Speech Community" with D. Yibarbuk (2024, EACL), "Envisioning NLP for Intercultural Climate Communication" (2024, ClimateNLP), and "Understanding how language revitalisation works: A realist synthesis" (2024, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development). In 2022, he received the Zampolli Prize. Bird has presented invited talks including "Supporting Linguistic Diversity" (2022) and "LT4All!? Rethinking the Agenda" (2021). His scholarship contributes to UN SDGs such as quality education, climate action, and strong institutions, with 2586 citations and an h-index of 27.