Prefer light?

Hi, I'm

Luis A. Mercado

I'm a computational linguist

Consummated geek, amateur everything else, now with a PhD in progress.

Luis A. Mercado

So, who am I?

Well, the long version is in Aramaic, so here's the short one.

Incurable language nerd, linguist, and software engineer. I build AI systems where code meets language. These days that means leading AI engineering work in industry while chasing a dual PhD in linguistics (focused on computational linguistics) and cognitive science, researching NLP for the indigenous languages of Mexico.

See my projects

Education

PhDs, CU Boulder, USA

1st PhD in

Linguistics

2nd PhD in

Cognitive science

MSc · Natural Language Processing

UPV/EHU · Spain

MSc · Computer Science

Tec de Monterrey · Mexico

BSc · Computer Science

Tec de Monterrey · Mexico

Translate Masewalkopa ↔ Spanish

work in progress

A translator I built specifically for the Masewalkopa variety of Nawatl (Santa Ana Tlacotenco). Live and bidirectional, and actually running right now. This is a different model from the one on Hugging Face: that one is more general, this one focuses solely on Masewalkopa.

Break down a Nawatl word

work in progress

A finite-state morphological analyzer I built for Masewalkopa · Nawatl, the same engine behind a feature in an app I'm currently working on. This is a small preview, not the full free-typing tool: a handful of real examples showing how it splits a word into its prefix, root, and suffix.

Things I've published

See all projects
AmericasNLP · ACL 2026

The power of simplicity: n-grams and transformers in Nahuatl language identification

Mercado Campos, L.A., Pugh, R., & Palmer, A.

deployed on Hugging Face

Spanish–Nawatl neural machine translation

A low-resource NMT system from my M.S. thesis (UPV/EHU), built with elotl.mx.

Call me, maybe?

Want to collaborate on minoritized (low-resource) NLP? Need a GenAI systems brain? Got a joke? Hit me up.