Sheryl Leicher -- Applied Linguist

Sheryl received an M.A. in Linguistics at the University of Michigan and continues to work on campus, teaching English Pronunciation and Academic English  and Technical Communication and Dissertation Writing. Through her linguistic studies and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), Sheryl has had a great deal of practical experience in limited domain, scenario-based language instruction, and a theoretical background in interactional socio-linguistics, socio-phonetics, and discourse analysis. She brings a unique perspective to the problems encountered during human-computer conversation (limited domain and limited recognition).

Sheryl graduated from Washburn University of Topeka, Kansas with a B.A. in German and Spanish. She attended The University of California at Irvine where she received a professional certificate in TESOL and has taught survival English to refugees and immigrants at several institutions.

She was an key contributor at Intellivoice Communications where she worked on projects to develop recognition and generation grammars for conversational agents in a network telephony environment.

Currently, she is part of the team that helps to model the expected recognition utterances and generated replies for some of ejTalk’s projects (i.e., CRM (Customer Relationship Management) B-to-B startup that is one of ejTalk’s clients. She is also involved with ejTalk’s conversation management technologies for a language instruction project that is targeted for release next year.

Sheryl has a wide range of experience with American English dialects and consulted for Oxford University Press in the development of their Learners Dictionary of American English.

Membership

• International TESOL
• LSA (Linguistic Society of America)