Dr Catherine Lai

Reader in Speech and Language Technology
Centre for Speech Technology Research
Linguistics and English Language
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
University of Edinburgh

Contact
Room 2.11, Dugald Stewart Building
10 Charles Street
EH89AD Edinburgh
email: <c . lai at ed ac uk>
Office hours by appointment

A photo of Catherine Lai with some sunflowers in the background

I am a Reader (~Associate Professor), effective August 2025, based in the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh. I work in Linguistics and English Language in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, and am also part of the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation in the School of Informatics where I was previously a post-doc/senior researcher.

My research focuses on how we can use the non-lexical aspects of speech (e.g. speech prosody: how we say what we say) to get at what speakers actually mean. I’m currently working mainly how prosody changes expectations of speech for spoken language understanding and speech synthesis. I’m interested in this for both theoretical and practical reasons. On the one hand, I’m interested in developing speech technologies that can better take account of contextual variation. On the other hand, I’m interested generally in understanding where non-lexical aspects of speech fit into linguistic theories. This means that I’m usually, in some way or another, working more generally on developing models of prosody in dialogue.

I’m particularly interested in how we can use ideas from both machine learning and linguistics (semantics, pragmatics and phonetics) to get a more robust understanding of the relationship between prosody, discourse structure, and information structure. Hopefully this will build some bridges between more theoretical and empirical approaches understanding of spoken communication, particularly terms of how we express and understand topic (what people are talking about) and affect (how people feel about what they’re talking about). We need these bridges to understand whether technologies actual do what people think they do and the risks of deploying them.

You can find out more about what I work on by looking at my publications page, and more about how I got here on the about page.

Teaching

In 2025-26 I will be teaching

  • Speech Processing (course organiser)

  • Researching Responsible NLP (course organiser)

  • Discourse Analysis

Research Interests

  • Prosody, discourse and dialogue structure, especially in conversational speech
  • Computational methods for spoken language understanding and speech synthesis
  • Perception of synthetic speech
  • Affective Computing
  • Speech processing for social science research and assistive technologies