I am interested in various aspects of speech synthesis, speech and prosody perception and production. Recently I have finished my dissertation thesis on prosody perception and production in an examplar-theoretic framework. This involved modelling human categorization of prosodic events by applying clustering and machine learning methods to speech data. The parameters that I am particularly interested in are temporal parameters and the PaIntE parameters, which are obtained by parametrizing F0 contours. The classifiers obtained in these experiments have been integrated in a prototype of a tool for automatic prosody prediction.

I have also worked on linguistic text pre-processing for speech synthesis, on prosody prediction and modelling for speech synthesis, and on corpus design for speech synthesis.

I have been teaching Sprachsynthese 1 (SS 2010, SS 2009, SS 2008), Sprachsynthese 2 (WS 2010/2011, WS 2009/2010, WS 2008/2009), Experimentelle Phonetik (WS 2008/2009), and Intonationsanalyse (WS 2007/2008). All materials can be found at ILIAS.

Currently I am working in the project Phonetic Convergence in Spontaneous Speech (A4) of the SFB 732. The aim of this project is to investigate convergence of speakers in spontaneous dialogs. Convergence is the process of adapting one's speech to that of an interlocutor. We are interested in understanding exactly which phonetic properties are adjusted in convergence. However, another important aspect of the project is to develop an automatic procedure for creating large databases for phonetic research on spontaneous speech.