Zach Hopton

I’m a PhD student at the University of Zurich, supervised by Eleanor Chodroff.

As part of the SNF project “Strengthening the Role of Generative Machine Learning in Psycholinguistics,” I also work closely with Ryan Cotterell and his lab at ETH Zurich. My entry point to linguistics was amazement at how diverse the world’s languages are, and now my research reflects that with three major questions:

Zach sitting on a rock at the beach at sunset
  1. What are the underlying cognitive mechanisms that allow humans to use such a diverse range of languages efficiently?
  2. What can speech processing models tell us about how sound patterns are realized across speakers and languages?
  3. How can language technology be made to perform better for diverse language varieties?

To that end, my research usually falls somewhere in:

I also love to keep up with work on typology and hope to veer into the field more myself at some point.

More on the research page, or see my publications and CV (being updated).

In my free time, I enjoy all things cardio (running, cross-country skiing, and recently cycling), baking, and learning languages (predictable, I know). I particularly like mixing my running with travel, feel free to follow along on Strava!