Dirk Schmidt

Previous Institutions:

Esukhia • CIIS • Rice University

Research Focus:

Applied linguistics for Tibetan language(s). Primarily, I focus on Zhichag (Settlement) varieties of Tibetan found in India and Nepal, and issues of diglossia, readability & literacy, and second language pedagogy. My work draws from ideas and methods found in corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, translation studies, second language acquisition (SLA), and natural language processing (NLP).

General Interests:

Language change • Language Rights • Children’s Literature • Digital Humanities • Philosophy (Buddhist & Western) • Intercultural communication • Materials Development

Recent Publications:

(forthcoming) A Comprehensive Approach to Middle Tibetan: Developing reading comprehension & translation skills for ‘classical’ texts by speaking Tibetan. Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage. Université de Lausanne.

(in press) NLP for Readability, Graded Literature, & Materials Development in Tibetan. Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines.

(2022) On the Yak Horns of a Dilemma: Diverging Standards in Diaspora Tibetan. In Gwendolyn Hyslop, Gerald Roche (Eds.), Bordering Tibetan Languages—Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia. Amsterdam University Press. Link.

(2021) Taming the Wild Etext: Managing, Annotating, and Sharing Tibetan Corpora in Open Spaces. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 20:2:22, pp 1–23. Link.

(2020) Grading Tibetan Children’s Literature: A Test Case Using the NLP Readability Tool “Dakje”. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 19:6:75, pp 1–19. Link.