Eva Lasarcyk, M.A.
I am a Ph.D. student of phonetics at the
International Research Training Group Language Technology and Cognitive Systems in the department of
Computational Linguistics and Phonetics
at Saarland University under the supervision of Prof. William J. Barry.
Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics
Saarland University
66041 Saarbrücken
Office: Building C7 2, Room 4.09
Phone: +49-681-302-4689
Research Areas
My work's focus is twofold: I have been addressing questions of speech production mechanisms regarding (mainly) paralinguistic phenomena, and assessing the capabilities of a new "discovery tool" for phonetic research.
I have used the articulatory speech synthesis system developed by Peter Birkholz (Vocal Tract Lab) to explore issues in synthetic speech such as larynx height and voice quality, simulating laughter in conversational speech and its perception, simulation and perception of synthetic speech laughs and smiled speech, and means to convey (un-)certainty in speech.
Current interests are synthesis of vocal age and modern German regional accents.
The studies are mostly explorative in nature to find out how well the articulatory speech synthesis system I am using is suited as a "discovery tool" for phonetic research. The experiments I am conducting represent examples of different kinds of research questions in the area of speech production that can be addressed with this tool. They cover sub-glottal, glottal and supra-glottal aspects of speech production.
At our institute, Ingmar Steiner is also working with this articulatory synthesis software.
Recent Activities
Visiting PhD student at the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh during autumn 2009.
Co-organization of a research project during the 2008 IRTG Annual Research Meeting in Edinburgh: Search Engine for Phonetic Corpora.
Participation in the Johns Hopkins Summer School and Summer Research Workshop in Baltimore in 2008, working in the team of Vocal Aging Explained by Vocal Tract Modeling.
Co-organization of a research project during the
IGK Annual Research Meeting 2007:
aXenTTS - Synthesis of Foreign-Accented Speech.
Co-organization of the
social activities during the annual research meeting.
Perl-Programmierkurs SS 2007.
Documents
Werner Spiegl, Georg Stemmer, Eva Lasarcyk, Varada Kolhatkar, Andrew Cassidy, Blaise Potard, Stephen Shum, Young Chol Song, Puyang Xu, Peter Beyerlein, James Harnsberger, Elmar Nöth (2009). Analyzing Features for Automatic Age Estimation on Cross-Sectional Data. In: Proceedings 10th Interspeech, Brighton, September 6-10. 2923-2926. [pdf]
Eva Lasarcyk (2009): VocalTractLab als adäquates Entdeckungswerkzeug für Phonetik und Phonologie. 5. Jahrestreffen Phonetik und Phonologie, Köln, 3. März 2009.
Jürgen Trouvain, Sascha Fagel and Eva Lasarcyk (2009). Überlegungen zur Messung von Larynxhöhe. 5. Jahrestreffen Phonetik und Phonologie, Kön, 3. März 2009.
[pdf]
Sascha Fagel, Jürgen Trouvain and Eva Lasarcyk (2009). Observing lip and vertical larynx movements during smiled speech (and laughter). Interdisciplinary Workshop on Laughter and other Interactional Vocalisations in Speech, Berlin, February 27-28, 2009. [pdf]
Eva Lasarcyk and Jürgen Trouvain (2008): Spread Lips + Raised Larynx + Higher F0 = Smiled Speech? - An Articulatory Synthesis Approach. Proceedings 8th International Speech Production Seminar (ISSP), Strasbourg, December 8-12. 345-348. [pdf] [Supplementary files] (PR)
Eva Lasarcyk and Varada Kolhatkar (2008). Error Analysis of Formant Tracking Algorithms. In: Peter Beyerlein, Andrew Cassidy, Varada Kholhatkar, Eva Lasarcyk, Elmar Nöth, Blaise Potard, Stephen Shum, Young Chol Song, Werner Spiegl, Georg Stemmer, Puyang Xu: Vocal Aging Explained by Vocal Tract Modelling: 2008 JHU Summer Workshop Final Report. Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. [pdf]
Charlotte Wollermann and Eva Lasarcyk (2007): Modeling and perceiving of different degrees
of certainty in articulatory speech synthesis. In: Proceedings 6th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis, Bonn, August 22-24. 40-45. [pdf] (PR)
Eva Lasarcyk (2007): Investigating Larynx Height With An Articulatory Speech Synthesizer.
In: Proceeding 16th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Saarbrücken, August 6-10. [pdf and supplementary files] (PR)
Poster version of paper at ICPhS 2007: "What happens when an articulatory synthesizer moves its larynx up and down?"
[pdf]
Eva Lasarcyk and Jürgen Trouvain (2007): Imitating Conversational Laughter With
An Articulatory Speech Synthesizer. In: Proceedings Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Phonetics of Laughter, Saarbrücken, August 4-5. 43-48. [Homepage] (PR)
Eva Lasarcyk (2006): "Phonetik und Phonologie". In: Irene Cramer and Sabine Schulte im Walde (Editors). Computerlinguistik und Sprachtechnologie: Eine Studienbibliographie. Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Stauffenberg Verlag, Mannheim, 2006. [Online references]
Eva Lasarcyk (2005): Wie deutsch klingt Englisches im Deutschen - und warum?
Magisterarbeit, Institut für Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik, Universität Bonn. (How German do English words sound in German - and why? Master's thesis, University of Bonn.)
[pdf]
(PR) indicates peer-reviewed publications.
