Ailbhe Ni Chasaide
Professor
Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences
Trinity College Dublin
Ireland
Biography
Ailbhe Ní Chasaide graduated from the Universities of Galway (B.A.), Bordeaux (Maîtrise es Lettres) and Bangor, Wales (M.A., Ph.D). When first appointed to Trinity College Dublin, she founded the Phonetics & Speech Laboratory and is currently Professor of Phonetics. She is a Fellow of Trinity College, and has served as a Member of the University's Board and as School Director of Research. She has also served as Treasurer and Vice-President of the International Phonetic Association. She has directed over 20 funded research projects, on voice analysis and the role of voice in communication, on the prosody of Irish, and on the development of speech technology and linguistic resources for Irish. Awards, such as a Fullbright Fellowship and a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship have funded extended research periods with the M.I.T Speech Group, Haskins Laboratories (Yale), KTH, Stockholm, and Oxford University.
Research Interest
I carry out research on the voice, and on its role in speech communication, on the prosodic and segmental structure of Irish, and on speech technology for Irish. This research is carried out with the research group of the Phonetics & Speech Lab. The voice carries different strands of information: personal (on the identity and characteristics of the speaker), linguistic (shaping the prosodic structure of the message) and paralinguistic (through tone-of-voice conveying our feelings and attitude to the speaker and to the message). I am interested particularly on the interaction of the latter two, which together make up the 'prosody of the voice', and work towards the elaboration a more holistic model of speech prosody, using specialised voice analysis techniques developed here at TCD. I also research the prosody and segmentals of Irish and of Irish English. Developing speech technology for Irish dialects is a further research interest that builds on the theoretical and empirical strands of my research. Text-to-speech systems, developed for Irish dialects, are made available at www.abair.ie, and along with this, a growing body of resources, aimed at language users/learners, and at disability access. This work on Irish aims further to explore how speech technology resources can play a role in the maintenance and preservation of endangered languages.
Publications
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Kane, J., Yanushevskaya, I., NÃ Chasaide, A. and Gobl, C., Exploiting time and frequency domain measures for precise voice source parameterisation, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Shanghai, China, 2012, pp143 - 146
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Judge, J., NÃ Chasaide, A., NÃ Dhubhda, R., Scannell, K. P. and UÃ Dhonnachadha, E. , The Irish language in the digital age, Springer, 2012, 87pp
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NÃ Chasaide, A., Kane, J., Dalton, J., Yanushevskaya, I. and Gobl, C., Analysing the voice, Proceedings of the Workshop on Innovation and Applications in Speech Technology (IAST, Dublin, Ireland, 2012, pp40 - 40
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Kane, J., Yanushevskaya, I., Dalton, J., Gobl, C. and NÃ Chasaide, A., Using phonetic feature extraction to determine optimal speech regions for maximising the effectiveness of glottal source analysis, INTERSPEECH 2013, Lyon, France, 2013, pp29 - 33
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NÃ Chasaide, A., Yanushevskaya, I., Kane, J., Gobl, C., The voice prominence hypothesis: the interplay of F0 and voice source features in accentuation, INTERSPEECH 2013, Lyon, France, 2013, pp3527 - 3531
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Yanushevskaya I., Gobl C., NÃ Chasaide A., Voice quality in affect cueing: does loudness matter?, Frontiers in Psychology, 4, (335), 2013, p1 - 14
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Dalton, J., Kane, J., Yanushevskaya, I., Nà Chasaide, A. and Gobl, C., GlóRà - the Glottal Research Instrument, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Dublin, Ireland, 2014, pp944 - 948
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J. Kane, I. Yanushevskaya, C. De Looze, B. Vaughan, and A. NÃ Chasaide, Analysing the prosodic characteristics of speech-chunks preceding silences in task-based interactions, Interspeech 2014 , Singapore, 2014, 2014, pp333 - 337
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C. De Looze, I. Yanushevskaya, J. Kane, and A. NÃ Chasaide, Pitch range declination and reset in turn-taking organisation, Proceedings of Speech Prosody 7, Speech Prosody 7, Dublin, Ireland, 2014, 2014, pp1100 - 1104
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Nà Chiaráin, N. & Nà Chasaide, A., Evaluating text-to-speech synthesis for CALL applications, Proceedings of the International CALL Research Conference, Antwerp, 2014, International CALL Research Conference, Antwerp, 2014, University of Antwerp, 2014, pp104 - 110
