Paul Sheldon Cohen (born February 24, 1941) is an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

(M.A.

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, 1970), who has been professionally active in language-related areas since 1963, when he took a position as an editor on the

Random House Dictionary of the English Language ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary'' is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as ''The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition''. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315, ...

. From 1965 to 1967 he worked with

William Labov William Labov ( ; born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of ...

and coauthored several reports on

African American Vernacular English African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urba ...

.William Labov, University of Pennsylvania
/ref> He has spent the majority of his career (most of the period from 1968 to 2002) working for IBM in such areas as

automatic speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ...

text-to-speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...

, and natural language processing as a Research Staff Member, and also in development (Senior Computational Linguist) and strategy (Program Manager, Speech Technology). During that period, in addition to a stint as Senior Product Developer / Linguist (2000 to 2001) at

Net2Phone Net2phone provides VoIP and cloud computing-based telephony products and services. The company is a subsidiary of IDT Corporation. History Net2Phone was founded in 1990. On July 30, 1999, during the dot-com bubble, the company became a public com ...

, Inc., he also held various editorial and consulting positions (inside and outside IBM), and was a member of the committee that formulated the original Electric Company television series. Cohen holds seven patents in various areas of speech processing. Since 2002, he has been a consultant and independent researcher, and has published several articles in the fields of

Indo-European studies Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical pro ...

and English

etymology Etymology ()The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the Phonological chan ...

and

philology Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as th ...

Selected publications

* 1968, (with William Labov, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis). ''A study of the Non-Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City, V. 1: Phonological and Grammatical Analysis''. Washington, DC: Office of Education, Bureau of Research/ERIC. * 1968, (with William Labov, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis). ''A study of the Non-Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City', V. 2: The Use of Language in the Speech Community''. Washington, DC: Office of Education, Bureau of Research/ERIC.

References

Linguists from the United States 1942 births Living people Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Computational linguistics researchers {{US-linguist-stub