former PhD Student at the University of Edinburgh, now head of Junior Research Group in Saarbrücken, Cluster of Excellence Saarland University email: v.LASTNAMEed.ac.uk new address: Exzellenzcluster / FR 4.7 Computerlinguistik Saarland University Postfach 151150 66041 Saarbrücken Germany office: Campus C7 4, room 2.05
Go to my new homepage.
News: I'm going to be heading a Junior Research Group at the MMCI, Saarland University, Germany, from October 2010!
During my PhD at the Institute for
Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS), University of Edinburgh I worked
under the supervision of Frank Keller and Fernanda
Ferreira. I'm interested in using statistical methods from
computational linguistics for modelling human sentence processing. As
part of my PhD, I developed a psycholinguistically motivated version
of tree-adjoining grammar, PLTAG, and implemented the first strictly
incremental, fully connected parser.
In spring 2008, I spent three month working on a spoken dialog
system during my internship with Google / Mountain View.
From 2001 to 2006, I studied computational linguistics with computer science as a minor at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart. My thesis, which I did with IBM Research and Development GmbH, Böblingen, was concerned with letter-to-phoneme conversion for the German IBM Text-to-Speech Synthesis System. I investigated the benefit of morphological preprocessing for German speech synthesis, compared different approaches to syllabification, stress assignment and grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) conversion, and implemented a joint n-gram model for g2p that incorporates language-independent phonological constraints which help to boost performance significantly.
I'm also interested in unsupervised methods for morphological segmentation (see Software and Publications).
In 2004 / 2005, I obtained an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. The topic of my Master's thesis was "Information Presentation in Spoken Dialogue Systems". I developed a strategy for presenting a large number of options in spoken dialogue systems and implemented the approach in a flight recommendation system. This system exploits a user-model to identify the options that are particularly compelling to a given user. Multiple attractive options are structured and their respective advantages and disadvantages are compared explicitly.
See here for German cake recipes that I can recommend!