FACULTY

Biography

Dr. Penn obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000, and worked as a research scientist at Eberhard-Karls-University of Tuebingen, Germany (1996 to 1999) and at Bell Laboratories in the United States (1999 to 2001) before joining the U of T's Department of Computer Science. He is involved in a number of research projects including ALE, the Attribute-Logic Engine, a freeware logic programming language for natural language grammars, and TorGo, a project that develops speech technology for people with dysarthria.  Professor Penn's research primarily focuses on spoken language processing and discrete algorithms to support natural language technology.  His interests lie in Natural Language and Speech Processing, Mathematical Linguistics, Logic Programming, Description Logics, Finite State Methods, and Pronunciation Modelling. Professor Penn regularly teaches Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Principles of Programming Languages, Natural Language Computing, and graduate seminars on specialized topics in speech and language processing. He is a member of the Mathematics of Language Society, serves on the editorial boards of a number of publications including Computational Linguistics and Linguistics and Philosophy, and is a frequent presenter at the annual meetings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Keywords
Computational linguistics, theory of programming languages, computational morphology, grammar development environments