Nigel G. Ward, Professor of Computer Science, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. On the faculty of the University of Tokyo for ten years before joining UTEP in 2002, in 2015-2016 he was a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at Kyoto University. He chaired the Speech Prosody SIG from 2018 to 2024. He is co-creator of the Prosody Tutorial video series and similar presentations for the ACL, Interspeech, and the LSA. and is the author of Prosodic Patterns in English Conversation.
Ward's research areas are at the intersection of spoken language and human-computer interaction. Current topics include the subtle non-lexical and prosodic signals that enable inference of a dialog partner's needs, intentions, and feelings at the sub-second level; ways to model and exploit these phenomena to improve speech-to-speech translation systems, dialog systems and language assessment and teaching. These projects apply multiple methods: statistical, qualitative, corpus-based modeling, systems building, and experimental.
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