About me:I'm a current PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Broadly, my research interests encompass phonetics, phonology, and the linguistics of sign languages. I am part of the Sign Language Linguistic Lab , led by Diane Brentari.
Before starting my graduate work, I received my BA at Swarthmore College, with a major in Linguistics and a minor in Music.
In my current dissertation research, I focus on how reduction process occur across the different parts of the lexicon of American Sign Langauge (ASL). Previously, I have also collaborated on projects using computational approaches to examine the relationship between phonology and semantics in sign language, as well as projects working towards the automatic recognition of fingerspelling in ASL.
At the University of Chicago:
Identifying the Correlations Between the Semantics and the Phonology of American Sign Language and British Sign Language: A Vector Space Approach. 2022. Martinez del Rio*, Aurora, Casey Ferrara*, Sanghee J. Kim*, Emre Hakgüder & Diane Brentari. Frontiers in Psychology (13). (*=equal contribution) [Link to paper]
Fingerspelling recognition in the wild with iterative visual attention. 2019. Shi, Bowen, Aurora Martinez del Rio, Jonathan Keane, Diane Brentari, Greg Shakhnarovich & Karen Livescu. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 5400-5409). [link]
American sign language fingerspelling recognition in the wild. 2018. Shi, Bowen, Aurora Martinez del Rio, Jonathan Keane, Jonathan Michaux, Diane Brentari, Greg Shakhnarovich & Karen Livescu. In 2018 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) (pp. 145-152). IEEE.
Repetition Reduction across Multiple Repetitions in ASL Fingerspelling. 2021. Martinez del Rio, Aurora & Diane Brentari. 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. [slides]
A vector semantic approach to identifying iconicity in American Sign Language and British Sign Language. 2021. Hakgüder, Emre, Aurora Martinez del Rio, Casey Ferrara, Sanghee Kim & Diane Brentari. 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. [link]
Repetition Reduction across Multiple Repetitions in ASL Fingerspelling. 2020. Martinez del Rio, Aurora & Diane Brentari. Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign language Theory, Paris. [link]
Finding systematicity in the margins: Polysyllabic forms in the ASL lexicon. 2019. Martinez del Rio, Aurora. Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research. Universität Hamburg. [link]
Phonetic and Phonological Reduction in Fingerspelled Forms. 2019. Martinez del Rio, Aurora, Bowen Shi, Jonathan Keane, Greg Shakhnarovich, Diane Brentari, Julia Kersten, & Karen Livescu. Workshop on Automatic Recognition and Analysis of American Sign Language. The University of Chicago.