Rowan Lindsay-Smith
I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Language and Brain Laboratory at the University of Oxford, where I serve as the technical lead for the research and development of the FlexSR multilingual speech recognition system. I lead the development of research software across desktop, web and machine learning applications for the UKRI Pertinacity grant (2022-2027), the ERC Synergy PAAL award (2025-2031) and the ERC Proof of Concept FLEX-CODESWITCH project (2026-2027). My work spans scientific software engineering, computational infrastructure, machine learning, and experimental software supporting automatic speech recognition, psycholinguistic experiments, and linguistic fieldwork.
Alongside my software engineering, I conduct research in speech technology, phonology and historical linguistics. My current work includes multilingual automatic speech recognition and the phonology–phonetics interface. I have published in journals including the Annual Review of Linguistics and Transactions of the Philological Society, and co-edited the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics.
I completed my DPhil in Comparative Philology and General Linguistics at the University of Oxford in 2021, where I developed a phonological typology of sixteen modern Arabic varieties, investigating patterns of syllable structure, stress and affixation. During my doctoral research I began developing software to automate experimental workflows—work that ultimately evolved into tools that continue to support research in the laboratory today. My interest in Arabic began during my undergraduate degree in Oriental Studies (Arabic with Turkish) at Oxford and continues to inform both my linguistic research and my work on multilingual speech technologies.
I am particularly interested in building sustainable research software that enables reproducible science and helps researchers tackle problems that would otherwise be impractical at scale.
Research Software
- FlexSR – multilingual speech recognition
- XMod – psycholinguistic experimentation platform
- Harken – speech data collection platform
- AudioPipeline – configurable speech corpus preparation workflows
Selected Publications
ARTICLES
Lindsay-Smith, Emily (2024). Affix not clitic-based vowel shortening in Modern Arabic Varieties. Transactions of the Philological Society. DOI:10.1111/1467-968X.12287
Lindsay-Smith, Emily, Baerman, Matthew, Beniamine, Sacha, Sims-Williams, Helen and Erich Round (2024). Analogy in Inflection. Annual Review of Linguistics 10:211-31. DOI:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521-040935
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
Lahiri, Aditi, Booth, Joshua, Fritz, Isabella, Lindsay-Smith, Emily, and Hilary Wynne. (forthcoming) Pertinacity in diachrony and synchrony. 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Heidelberg, Germany). https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a1f73133-4555-4ffd-b258-6b7f9b84ef3d
Round, Erich, Mann, Stephen, Beniamine, Sacha, Lindsay-Smith, Emily, Esher, Louise, and Matt Spike (2022). Cognition and the stability of evolving complex morphology: an agent-based model. Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE), Kanazawa, Japan.
EDITED VOLUMES
2025. Holly Kennard, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Aditi Lahiri and Martin Maiden (Eds.). Historical Linguistics 2022: Selected papers from the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford, 1–5 August 2022. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
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