Students

PhD Students

Current Students

• Yuanchao Li, Speech emotion recognition (co-supervised with Peter Bell)

• Alice Ross, Perception and evaluation of synthetic speech (co-supervised with Lauren Hall-Lew)

• Emelie van de Vreken, Controllable affective speech synthesis (co-supervised with Korin Richmond)

• Bonnie Liu, Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Teaching Professionalism among Educational YouTubers in Taiwan (co-supervised with Sumin Zhao)

• Jack Tsangou, Multimodal emotion recognition (co-supervised with Hiroshi Shimodaira)

• Mai Hoang Dao, Laughter and subsidiary communicative features in conversational speech (co-supervised with Peter Bell)

Graduated Students

• Johannah O’Mahony, Synthesising Conversational Speech Using Found Data (with Simon King)

• Sarenne Wallbridge, Quantifying the perceptual value of lexical and non-lexical channels of spoken dialogue (with Peter Bell)

• Nina Markl, Language variation, automatic speech recognition and algorithmic bias (with Lauren Hall-Lew)

• Pilar Oplustil Gallegos, Using Local Linguistic Context for Text-to-Speech (with Simon King)

• Leimin Tian, Recognizing Emotions in Spoken Dialogue with Acoustic and Lexical Cues (with Johanna Moore)

A note for prospective PhD students

Most of my students have come through ILCC (Informatics) and its associated CDTs. I’m also open to supervising students through LEL/PPLS, but I generally prioritize students who want to work on prosody (and more generally what non-lexical content contributes to meaning) in relation to speech and language technology.

Alas, I don’t generally have time to comment on specific PhD proposals before submission nowadays. If you are interested in the things that I am, you can list me as a prospective supervisor in an application and I will look at your application package when it comes through. Sharon Goldwater has some good advice for what we are generally looking for in PhD proposals on her website.

Please do consider whether we are a good match though! For example, I get quite a lot of queries from people who want to work on topics around English as a second language. Although I have worked on L2 prosody and second language learning/assessment a bit in the (distant) past, it’s not something I’ve worked on for a long time or have much expertise in, so I generally say no to those. Similarly, I don’t really have the expertise to be the primary supervisor for qualitative discourse analysis projects (though I am into mixed-methods studies!). One the other end of a spectrum, I’m not really interested in chasing machine learning leaderboards, e.g. for emotion recognition (but I am interested in how we can use machine learning methods to understand contributions of different modalities to understanding spoken interactions!).

If you do a PhD, it’s really important to have a supervisor who can actually help you!

If you do apply to Edinburgh PhD programmes, make sure you identify more than one potential supervisor and, importantly, that you list this clearly in your application (on the application form and the proposal). This is will help ensure that your application goes to the right people in the review process.