Greg Kochanski

Research

The thread linking all of my research projects is that I build and solve computational models of complex systems. My research is in computational phonetics, learning about the strategies we use to produce speech. Since speech and language are complicated things, this involves large experiments and data sets.

Broadly speaking, my work is in the overlap of Linguistics, Psychology and Computer Science.

• My Papers.
• I am currently principal investigator on two ESRC -funded research projects. One looks at the strategies that we employ to pronounce new words that we've never spoken before. (Starts September 2008.) The other investigates differences in rhythm between English dialects and among other languages. (Starts August 2008.)

• My summer 2008 project involves testing speech recognition systems on the conversational parts of the British National Corpus. (In collaboration with John Coleman (Oxford) and Jiahong Yuan (UPenn).)

  The BNC has data that is almost unobtainable in these days of careful ethics approval and release forms. It contains conversations recorded by people who wore tape recorders as they went about their normal business. capturing the chaos of day-to-day speech. The BNC has been available as transcribed text, but so far the speech in it has been inaccessible. We're currently working on aligning the text to the speech.

  From a ASR point of view, it is a very challenging set of data because of the wide variety of the recording conditions. Noise will change from the rustle of paper to bird song to traffic sounds. The room acoustics varies from outdoors to the interior of an automobile.

• Mental Representations of Intonation
• Neurobiology and Biomechanics of Speech [Prosody] [Articulation]
• The IViE corpus, data I've used for research into speech intonation. [ESRC page for that project]
• Less Recent Research
  • Security for speech user interfaces.
  • Signal Processing
  • Strong Gravitational Lensing in Astrophysics.
• Collaborations
• Much of the source code that I've written is open-source and freely available. It tends to be signal processing code, code for optimizations and classifiers, and whatever I've needed. At the moment, documentation is scanty.
• Miscellaneous Questions and Answers.