YFRSW 2022

We had a great Young Female Researchers in Speech Science and Technology workshop (YFRSW) today at Inha University in Incheon/Korea. Thank you very much to my co-chairs Meg Zellers (University of Kiel, Germany) and Esther Klabbers (ReadSpeaker, USA), and the YFRSW 2022 organizing committee – especially Bowon Lee (Inha University, Korea)!

Our workshop participants presented their work, joined mentoring and panel sessions to discuss their questions, and subsequently attended Interspeech 2022. What a great opportunity, made possible by our sponsors, and all mentors and panelists participating in the event. Thanks, everyone! ♥

Talk at DFKI MLT

Today, I presented our Interspeech 2022 paper Cross-Cultural Comparison of Gradient Emotion Perception: Human vs. Alexa TTS Voices authored with Michelle Cohn (UC Davis, USA), Georgia Zellou (UC Davis, USA), and Bernd Möbius (Saarland University, Germany), in the Multilinguality and Language Technology group at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken. Thank you for having me!

CUI 2022 (July 26-28, 2022)

It was great to be back in Glasgow for the Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) conference 2022! Organized at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow, CUI offered three really exciting conference days!

In their keynote talks, Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow, UK) spoke about how CUIs may be able to become socially-aware if sociolinguistic theory is considered in their development, while Cathy Pearl (Google, USA), Saul Albert (Loughborough University, UK), and Elizabeth Stokoe (Loughborough University, UK) reflected on what insights from conversation analysis can, should, and should not be leveraged in conversation design for CUIs.

Follow the latest news about CUI on Twitter: @ACM_CUI

Talk at INESC-ID

Today I was a guest at INESC-ID in Lisbon/Portugal. I had the pleasure of getting to know the Human Language Technologies group and presenting my work. Thank you very much for the invitation, Helena Moniz, Alberto Abad, and Isabel Trancoso! ☀️

I was also happy to get a glimpse into the work of VoiceInteraction! Importantly, their offices feature a very nice view over the city, including the stadiums of Benfica and Sporting! ⚽ 🙂

E-book "Mottersproch" 📖

Today we celebrated the publication of the e-book: “Die Mottersproch in der Vielfalt des Deutschen / A língua materna na diversidade do alemão” edited by Cléo V. Altenhofen, Lucas Löff Machado, Claudia Wolff Pavan, and Willian Radünz (Editora Fundação Fénix, 366 p., ISBN: 978-65-81110-78-9, DOI: 10.36592/9786581110789)

In this book, scholars and researchers from Brazil and Germany address questions on the diversity of the German regional and immigration languages in a collection of 32 texts in a bilingual version in German (and varieties) plus Portuguese. The book is an irrefusable invitation to reflect on the role of the mother tongue in education and science, and an invaluable contribution to the visibility of issues that permeate the various situations of social life.

I had the pleasure of contributing a text discussing a song in Hohenlohisch (a German variety spoken primarily in the northeastern part of Baden-Württemberg) set to music by my grandfather Julius Gessinger. The e-book can be downloaded from the website of the Center of German and European studies (Porto Alegre/Brazil).

The live presentation of the book was recorded and can be viewed again here: