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Paper accepted to ACMMM 2025

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My paper “A Data-driven Approach to the Longitudinal Study of Canine Vocal Pattern Development” is accepted to ACMMM 2025 Brave New Ideas track!

Emotional Canines paper accepted to ACMMM 2025

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Our paper “EmotionalCanines: A Dataset for Analysis of Arousal and Valence in Dog Vocalization”, led by Tuan Dang, is accepted to ACMMM 2025 Datasets Track!

DogSpeak paper accepted to ACMMM 2025

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My paper “DogSpeak: A Canine Vocalization Classification Dataset” is accepted to ACMMM 2025 Datasets Track!

Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2025

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Our paper “Toward Automatic Discovery of a Canine Phonetic Alphabet” has received an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2025! A huge congratulations to the first author, Theron S. Wang, and the rest of the team!

ACL 2025 Paper Accepted

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Our paper “Toward Automatic Discovery of a Canine Phonetic Alphabet”, led by Theron S. Wang, is accepted to ACL 2025 Main Conference!

Awarded Fall 2024 REU Grant

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I am honored to have received a Fall 2024 Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant from the UTA Computer Science and Engineering Department for my continued research in animal language processing.

Awarded Spring 2024 REU Grant

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I am excited to announce that I have received a Spring 2024 Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant from the UTA Computer Science and Engineering Department to support my projects in animal language processing.

portfolio

Junior Full Stack Developer

December 2022 - June 2023

Junior Full Stack Developer at SilverLine System Integrators Pvt. Ltd. Spearheaded the development of 5+ full-stack applications using Django and Flask for the fintech startup.

Web Developer

June 2023 - Present

Web Developer at The University of Texas at Arlington, responsible for managing departmental web applications. Improved website-wide search query performance by over 90% using a caching mechanism.

publications

DogSpeak: A Canine Vocalization Classification Dataset

Published in ACM MM 25 (Datasets Track), 2025

This paper introduces DogSpeak, a dataset for canine vocalization classification.

Recommended citation: Hridayesh Lekhak, Theron S. Wang, Tuan M. Dang, and Kenny Q. Zhu. 2025. DogSpeak: A Canine Vocalization Classification Dataset. In Proc. ACM MM 25 (Datasets Track).
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Toward Automatic Discovery of a Canine Phonetic Alphabet

Published in Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 2025

Dogs communicate intelligently but little is known about the phonetic properties of their vocalization communication. For the first time, this paper presents an iterative algorithm inspired by human phonetic discovery, which is based on minimal pairs that determine phonemes by distinguishing different words in human language, and is able to produce a complete alphabet of distinct canine phoneme-like units.

Recommended citation: Wang, T. S., Li, X., Lekhak, H., Dang, T. M., Wu, M., & Zhu, K. Q. (2025, July). Toward Automatic Discovery of a Canine Phonetic Alphabet. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 9207-9219).
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A Data-driven Approach to the Longitudinal Study of Canine Vocal Pattern Development

Published in Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia, 2025

This paper presents a data-driven approach to the longitudinal study of canine vocal pattern development.

Recommended citation: Lekhak, Hridayesh and Wang, Theron S. and Dang, Tuan M. and Zhu, Kenny Q. (2025). A Data-driven Approach to the Longitudinal Study of Canine Vocal Pattern Development. In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM \"25).
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