Richard Sproat is a computational linguist currently working for Sakana AI as a research scientist.
[1] Prior to joining Sakana AI, Sproat worked for Google between 2012 and 2024[2] on text normalization[3] and speech recognition.
[1] Sproat graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, under the supervision of Kenneth L.
[4] 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.
[5] 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,[6] was considered a seminal work in formalizing this component of speech synthesis systems.