Hello, I’m Rok Sim (심록). Welcome to my webpage! Can you spot me? That’s me in the photo wearing a gat (갓), a traditional Korean hat—back when I dreamed of becoming a daegeum (대금), a Korean large bamboo transverse flute, player.

I’m currently a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in Linguistics at the University of South Carolina. I defended my dissertation on January 16, 2026, and I expect to graduate in May 2026. My dissertation, The Historical Development of Indefinites in Korean: A Corpus-Based Analysis, examines how grammatical change unfolds through the interaction of linguistic constraints and sociohistorical conditions, using corpus data from 1700 to 1990.

Building on this corpus work, I’m developing human-in-the-loop annotation pipelines in which AI proposes labels and experts review them, with transparent evaluation and careful error analysis. The goal is to show when AI can be used responsibly to speed up research—and when human expertise must remain central.

Beyond my dissertation, my research examines how linguistic patterns shift over time and come to carry social meaning across sociocultural contexts—and how those meanings are interpreted by people and, increasingly, by AI-enabled tools used in learning and assessment. Methodologically, I combine corpus-based analysis with perception experiments: I analyze historical and contemporary corpora to trace change, variation, and discourse, and I design experiments to test how listeners evaluate socially meaningful forms.

In my peer-reviewed work, I investigate these questions through studies of racialized discourse in South Korea (Ethnic and Racial Studies, in press), GenAI/LLM evaluation of Korean aegyo (“talking cute”) (The Journal of Linguistic Science, 2025), and experimental research on English regional variation (American Speech, 2024; English Language and Linguistics, in press).

You can find my CV, Publications, In Progress, Presentations, and Teaching via the menu above. You can also click About Me to learn more.