Computational sociophonetics using automatic speech recognition

Recent years have seen numerous advances in natural language processing that can help accelerate sociophonetic work. These include software to align speech recordings with their transcriptions, as well as to transcribe audio automatically. This solves a major bottleneck and will help process larger datasets and test hypotheses more efficiently. This paper will summarise recent progress, highlight relevant examples of sociophonetic research, and comment on the technical and ethical issues at the cutting edge of natural language processing.