Mark Liberman Named the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics

Mark Liberman has been appointed the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics in the School of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Liberman is the director of the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories that is housed at Penn and supports language-related education, research and technology development by creating and sharing linguistic resources. He is also a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the former co-director of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science.

Professor Liberman’s research interests include the psychology and phonetics of lexical tone and its relationship to intonation; the gestural, prosodic, morphological and syntactic ways of marking focus and their use in discourse; formal models for linguistic annotation; and information retrieval and information extraction from text. He serves as the Faculty Master of Ware College House and the faculty director of College Houses and Academic Services.

Dr. Liberman received his Ph.D. in linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the founder of Language Log, a blog which houses articles from dozens of professional linguists.

This chair is one of 10 Browne Distinguished Professorships created by the late Christopher H. Browne, C’69, former chairman of the Board of Overseers of the School of Arts and Sciences and trustee of the University of Pennsylvania. The Browne Chairs recognize faculty members who have achieved an extraordinary reputation for scholarly contributions, who have demonstrated great distinction in teaching, and who have demonstrated intellectual integrity and unquestioned commitment to free and open discussion of ideas.