Miikka Silfverberg

Miikka Silfverberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UBC.

Previously, he worked as a Lecturer of Language Technology at the University of Helsinki.

Miikka received his PhD in Language Technology from the University of Helsinki in 2016. After completing his PhD, Miikka spent one and a half years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he worked on computational modeling of word structure using deep neural networks.

Miikka is interested in understanding how neural networks can learn linguistic structure and how this structure is represented in their internal memory. For example, he has studied the kind of phonetic representations that neural networks learn when they are trained to inflect words.

Research interests: What kind of linguistic structures do machine learning models learn? How are those structures represented? Miikka is also interested in developing tools for natural language processing of underserved languages.