Name Pronunciations in the ACL Community

Properly pronouncing a person's name is a basic tenet of respect and decency. It is often jarring to hear people's names mispronounced, for example at introuctions of speakers for invited talks. At the same time, it is often difficult to know how to pronounce someone's name in light of English's wonderful orthography, which has resisted centuries of attempted spelling reforms going back at least to the 16th century. Moreover, there are no clearly defined social conventions for asking someone how to pronounce their name, and asking can sometimes be awkward.

This repo is an attempt to solve this problem by providing a database of phonetic transcriptsion of names of folks in the ACL community. Please contribute!

Some guidelines:

• Identically spelled last names might have different pronunciations, so transcriptions should include links to homepages or other identifying information.
• There are many names that many people might consider unambiguous, but ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder. Therefore any name that has given any person trouble could be included.

A

B

C

D

• Seza Dogruoz "SEZZ uh doe rue uz"

E

F

G

• Dan Gildea "dan gill DAY"
• Yoav Goldberg "yahv goldberg"

H

• Matt Huenerfauth "matt YOO ner fowth"

I

J

• Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt "MAR chin JUN chis DOE mun"

K

L

M

N

O

P

• Post "poast"

Q

R

S

T

• Joel Tetreault "jole TAY troh"

U

V

• Van Durme "van DERM ee"

W

X

Y

Z