Margot Masson

Title: Could you please repeat that? Deep learning non-native speech patterns

Supervision Team: Julie Berndsen, UCD / Anthony Ventresque, UCD / Naomi Harte, TCD

Description: Voice interfaces have become pervasive in our daily lives with industry now looking to further transform user voice-experiences. The success of the big players has been due to the enormous amount of data they now have available which can be exploited by deep learning technologies. While speech recognition is often regarded to be a “solved problem”, non-native and accented speech (i.e. regional variation, dialect) continues to be problematic primarily due to the lack of data. This PhD project draws together natural language processing, speech technologies, quality assessment and AI applying deep learning to the identification of native/non-native speaker models for personalised interactive language education and assessing the performance of speech recognition systems in order to provide feedback to developers of such systems.