First-year of study M.A. theme seminars (1MA THEME) for winter term 2024–2025 (Language, Mind, Technology)

What is this list?

This is a list of theme seminars we intend to launch in the winter term (October–February) in of our full-time M.A. programme Language, Mind, Technology. (For information on subject seminars for English Philology, follow this link.)

How to navigate the list?

The list is sorted by name of the teacher. The format of each entry is the following: title of the theme seminar, the name of the teacher, and the description of the proseminar.

Speech-based Artificial Intelligence

dr Zofia Malisz

The course’s aim is to introduce students to the application, impact and technological implementation of modern Speech AI systems such as data-driven speech synthesis and analysis. The second aim is to enable students of different backgrounds, also in humanities, to be able to understand and interpret papers in Speech AI and prospectively manage basic Speech AI projects.

Selected literature
  1. Jurafsky, D., Martin, J. H. (2009). Speech and language processing : an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall. Taylor, P. (2009). Textto- speech synthesis. Cambridge University Press. Trouvain, J., & Möbius, B. (2020). Speech synthesis: text-to-speech conversion and artificial voices. Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, 3837-3851.
  2. Johnson, K., & Johnson, K. (2004). Acoustic and auditory phonetics. Phonetica, 61(1), 56-58. Black, A., Taylor, P., Caley, R., & Clark, R. (1998). The Festival speech synthesis system. Oord, A. V. D., Dieleman, S., Zen, H., Simonyan, K., Vinyals, O., Graves, A., ... & Kavukcu- oglu, K. (2016). Wavenet: A generative model for raw audio. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.03499.
  3. Wang, Y., Skerry-Ryan, R. J., Stanton, D., Wu, Y., Weiss, R. J., Jaitly, N., ... & Saurous, R. A. (2017). Tacotron: Towards endto-end speech synthesis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.10135. King, S. (2015, August). A Reading list of recent advances in speech synthesis. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK, Paper (No. 1043).
  4. Wagner, P., Beskow, J., Betz, S., Edlund, J., Gustafson, J., Eje Henter, G., ... & Voße, J. (2019). Speech synthesis evaluation—state-of-the-art assessment and suggestion for a novel research program. In Proceedings of the 10th Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW10).
  5. Watts, O., Henter, G. E., Merritt, T., Wu, Z., & King, S. (2016, March). From HMMs to DNNs: where do the improvements come from?. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 5505-5509). IEEE.
  6. Malisz, Z., Henter, G. E., Valentini-Botinhao, C., Watts, O., Beskow, J., & Gustafson, J. (2019). Modern speech synthesis for phonetic sciences: A discussion and an evaluation. In International Congress of Phonetic Sciences ICPhS 2019 5-9 August 2019, Melbourne, Australia Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
  7. Fallgren, P., Malisz, Z., & Edlund, J. (2019). How to annotate 100 hours in 45 minutes. In Interspeech 2019 15-19 September 2019, Graz (pp. 341-345). ISCA. King, S. (2003). Dependence and independence in automatic speech recognition and synthesis. Journal of Phonetics, 31(3-4), 407-411.

Contemporary Themes in Phonological Research

prof. UAM dr hab. Paula Orzechowska

In this seminar, we will discuss phenomena related to the phonological structure of words in English (and other languages) and try to answer the following questions: How are syllables of varying complexity processed? Does morphology affect the processing of consonant clusters? How are words stored in the minds of speakers? The literature will embrace several areas of external evidence (e.g. psycholinguistics, language acquisition, sound symbolism).

Selected literature
  1. Clements, G. N. 1990. "The Role of the Sonority Cycle in Core Syllabification", in: Kingston J. & M. Beckman (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology I. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 283-333.
  2. Dressler, W. U & K. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk. 2006. “Proposing morphonotactics”, Wiener Linguistische Gazette 73, 1-19.
  3. Hay, J. & I. Plag. 2004. “What constrains possible suffix combinations? On the interaction of grammatical and processing restrictions in derivational morphology”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22, 565-596.
  4. Treiman, R. (1984). On the Status of Final Consonant Clusters in English Syllables. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23(3), 343–56. DOI: 10.1016/S0022-5371(84)90237-8
  5. Ulbrich, J. Knaus, P. Orzechowska, P. Alday, R. Wiese. 2016. The role of phonotactic principles in language processing. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 662-682.
  6. Wrembel, M. 2009. On hearing colours-cross modal association in vowel perception in a non-synaesthetic population. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45(4), 581–598.