How I started learning languages
I learned my first second language the old-fashioned way — total immersion. I spent two years in New Caledonia and taught myself French through a disciplined cycle of morning study and afternoon practice. Every day, I dedicated three hours to reading and memorizing French vocabulary, then went out in the afternoon to meet people and speak. That rhythm — acquire in the morning, generalize in the afternoon — became the foundation of how I think about language learning. It is also the core design principle of Allomorpheus.
Later, in college, I started teaching myself Arabic. I eventually did a study abroad where I applied the same discipline in a compressed timeframe, reaching Advanced-Mid on the Arabic OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview). The experience reinforced something I suspected from French: motivation is everything, and the best vocabulary is the vocabulary you actually use.
From languages to linguistics
My interest in how languages work — especially the ones with the most complex morphology — led me to computational linguistics. I earned an MSc in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington, then a PhD in Computational Linguistics at Charles Darwin University in Australia.
My research focused on polysynthetic and morphologically complex languages — the kind where words can contain as much information as an entire English sentence. I built finite state morphological analyzers, interactive transcription systems, and word completion tools for languages like Plains Cree and Kunwinjku. The technical challenge of modeling these systems is what gave me the perspective to build Allomorpheus: if you understand the structure of a language — from discourse down to individual morphs — you can build tools that actually help people acquire it.
Selected publications
All papers are available on ACL Anthology.
Interactive Word Completion for Plains Cree
ACL 2022 (Long Papers) · William Lane, Atticus Harrigan, Antti Arppe
A Finite State Approach to Interactive Transcription
FieldMatters 2022 · William Lane, Steven Bird
Bootstrapping Techniques for Polysynthetic Morphological Analysis
ACL 2020 (Main Conference) · William Lane, Steven Bird
Interactive Word Completion for Morphologically Complex Languages
COLING 2020 · William Lane, Steven Bird
Towards A Robust Morphological Analyzer for Kunwinjku
ALTA 2019 · William Lane, Steven Bird
Why I built Allomorpheus
Every language app I tried fell into the same trap: they gamified the process and called it learning. Streaks, points, pre-packaged lessons. None of them treated language as a structural system that you could understand and generalize from.
Allomorpheus is what I wish I had when I was learning French in New Caledonia and Arabic abroad. A tool that lets you immerse in content you care about, build a personal vocabulary grounded in real use, review with spaced repetition, and practice with an AI tutor that adapts to your actual mistakes. No gamification. No pre-packaged lists. Just the structure and the tools.
If you want to see the philosophy behind the platform in detail, read How I Actually Learn Languages.
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