Vol 1 Issue 5 (pdf – 3.53MB) - CNGL

www.cngl.ie 3AwardsEva Szekely wins National ‘Thesis in 3’ CompetitionSuccess is inthe Air!Eva Szekely, a CNGL PhDstudent based in UCD,beat off sff compeonfrom 24 other PhD students fromCSETs around Ireland to win thenaonal Thesis in Threecompeon on 9th November.Talented communicators fromthe 9 SFI‐funded Centres forScience, Engineering andTechnology presented theirresearch in bite‐sized chunks ‐three slides in three minutes. Theaudience of 300 people enjoyed averitable communicaons masterclass at the Mansion House,Dublin.Eva won first place in thecompeon for herpresentaon "Voices thatSpeak for You", whichdescribed her work on infusingemoon inspeech synthesis.Eva's researchaims to createexpressivespeech synthesisEva presented herwinning pitch at theSFI Summit infrom audiobook Novemberrecordings andthen to personalise this toindividual user needs. Eva hasdeveloped techniques thatanalyse the voice quality fromopen source audio books todetect different styles such asa cheerful, calm or forcefulPresent your work inthree minutes using justthree slides—this is thechallenge posed by theThesis in 3 compeon,in which CNGL’s EvaSzekely excelled lastmonthvoice. She is then able to usethis analysis to parameterisespeech synthesis systems todynamically produce speechin the requiredstyle. This willallow futurespeech synthesissystems to speakto peopleexpressively inaccordance totheir personal preferencesand the requirements of thecontent being spoken.“As well as supporng speechsynthesis for audio books, thisresearch has great potenal inCNGL students recordedconsiderable successthis quarter with winsin naonal andinternaonalcompeons. Chiefamong them were EvaSzekely’s ‘Thesis in 3’win and Yifan He‘s ‘LRCBest Thesis Award’applicaons such as speech‐tospeechtranslaon, human‐robotinteracon and support for thosewith speech impairments”,explains Eva.Also represenng CNGL at thenaonal final were HannaBechara ("Recycling MachineTranslaon") and Wei Li("Retrieval Rescued byRecommendaon”).Eva was invited to deliver herwinning presentaon at the SFISummit 2011 in Athlone inNovember. Many senioracademics in aendancecommented on the high qualityof Eva’s content and delivery.Yifan He wins LRC Best Thesis AwardYifan He of CNGL has beenannounced Winner of the LRCBest Thesis Award 2011. Yifan’swin makes it four-in-a-row forCNGL students based at DCU.Yifan made history earlier thisyear when he became the firstCNGL student to complete hisPhD viva, under thesupervision of Prof Andy Wayand Prof Josef van Genabith.His thesis is titled ‘TheIntegration of MachineTranslation and TranslationMemory’. The work focuses onthree aspects: 1) translationrecommendation andtranslation re-ranking modelsthat can access high qualityMT outputs in the TMenvironment, 2) a subsegmenttranslationmemory and machinetranslation integrationmodel that improvesboth translationThe LRC thanked SymantecIreland for its generousYifan’s winmakes itfour‐in‐a‐row forCNGL studentssponsorship of theaward for thefifteenthconsecutive year.Symantec’ssponsorship hasconsistency and translation made this award the mostquality, and 3) a human successful and longest runningevaluation pipeline to validate award in the industry, attractingthe effectiveness of his models a significant number ofwith human judgments.international entries.