Expert profile: Alex Monaghan [ PhD ]

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Alex Monaghan's CV
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  Structure

     + Background Info
     + Major Research Projects
     + Miscellaneous
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                                Background Info

   Alex Monaghan is currently the senior scientist for speech synthesis
   at Aculab plc, UK. Aculab produces hardware and software for computer
   telephony applications. AculabTTS is a multilingual system offering
   excellent quality speech with a very high channel count (over 100
   channels on a standard PC).

   From 1993 to 2000 he was a Lecturer in Computational Linguistics in
   the Computer Applications Department of Dublin City University,
   Ireland. He lectured in Linguistics, Phonetics, Computational
   Linguistics, Speech Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive
   Science, Logic, and PROLOG Programming.

   From 1986 to 1993, he was a researcher at the Department of
   Linguistics and the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the
   University of Edinburgh.

   He has published widely in the areas of prosody, speech synthesis,
   speaker characterisation, intonational phonology and dialogue
   generation.

  Academic Qualifications:-

     + MA(Hons) summa cum laude in Linguistics with Artificial
       Intelligence, University of Edinburgh.
     + PhD in Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. Supervisor: Bob Ladd.
       Thesis title: ``Intonation in a Text-to-Speech Conversion
       System.''
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                            Major Research Projects

   October 1996-May 1999 -- Site Manager for EU-funded EUROMAP project,
   surveying and supporting Language Engineering and related IT
   throughout Europe.
   October 1996-April 1998 -- Award Holder on an Irish government grant
   to develop a prototype system for Information Retrieval from radio
   news broadcasts, jointly with Alan Smeaton and Ronan Scaife (DCU).
   1995-2000 -- Director of the National Centre for Language Technology,
   DCU. The NCLT is an umbrella organisation for the promotion and
   support of research combining linguistics and IT.
   November 1991-September 1993 -- Award Holder for an ESRC-funded
   project entitled "Pragmatic Factors in the Intonation of Synthesised
   Spoken Dialogue".
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                                 Miscellaneous

   1997-2001 Vice-Chairman of COST 258 ("Naturalness in Synthetic
   Speech"), an EC-funded collaborative programme involving 15 European
   countries.
   1996-1998 General Secretary of the European Language Observatory, an
   association which exists to monitor language issues in Europe and to
   promote linguistic diversity.
   1994-1997 Organiser of the annual International Conference on the
   Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing (CSNLP).
   Member of the editorial boards of the Bulletin de Linguistique
   Appliquée et Générale and the International Journal of Speech
   Technology.
   Member of ISCA, the International Speech Communication Association.
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