Catherine Lai
I was a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. I successfully defended my dissertation in April 2012 and am now a post-doc research fellow at the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh, working on the InEvent project.At Penn, I worked in the phonetics lab where I took advice from Jiahong Yuan and many other people. I'm interested in the phonetics-semantics-pragmatics interface, which really means that I am interested in speech prosody. I hope that looking at the interactions in these areas can provide some bridging between the symbolic and probabilistic aspects of language. More generally, I'm interested in how you can compute these sorts of things.
In the past, I have served on the Student Advisory Committee of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA-SAC). Recently, I helped organize a workshop on New Tools and Methods for Very-Large-Scale Phonetics. I have also served of the organizing committee of the 2010 Young Researcher's Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRRSDS).
Quite a while ago, I did a research masters at the University of Melbourne, Australia. I was part of the Language Technology Group and my advisor was Steven Bird. Back in the day, I researched querying and manipulating linguistically annotated data. (ie. trees).
Besides this, I am a strong supporter of the work of Amnesty International.
Research Interests
Prosodic meaning: prosody and dialogue structure, perception of speaker affect and attitude.
Dialogue models: formal frameworks, the semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers, gradability, modals and attitude.
Corpus phonetics: automated F0 analysis, rhythm and lexical tone, non-native prosody.And here's my CV
I've also taught recitations and labs at the University of Melbourne, including
Introduction to Programming, and Logic and Computation.
email: <laic at babel ling upenn edu>
Teaching
LING 001: Introduction to Linguistics [TA: Spring 2008 (Embick/Yang)]
LING 106: Introduction to formal linguistics [TA: Fall 2007 (Nathan)]
LING 521: Phonetics Practicum [TA: Spring 2007 (Yuan)]
LING 520: Introduction to Phonetics [TA: Fall 2006 (Yuan)]
-- Dennis (Monty Python's Holy Grail)