SOME KEY TALKS

Transcribing Diverse Voices: Using Whisper for ICE corpora,
Interspeech 2025
Rotterdam | 20th August 2025


This talk evaluates one of the strongest open-source ASR systems, OpenAI Whisper, against two reference corpora of non-standard varieties: ICE Nigeria and ICE Scotland. Employing WER metrics, the study utilizes linear mixed-effects modelling to determine significant factors affecting transcription accuracy.
The results show that Whisper can manage both varieties, though it is slightly less accurate for Nigerian English. An increased model size reduces WER and boosts robustness, though accuracy varies by sound file. While Whisper proves useful for corpus transcription work overall, challenges such as speaker diarization, hallucinations and idealized transcriptions persist.
You can find the corresponding Interspeech paper here and the slides below.

Investigating Vowel Duration in the 21st Century: Aitken’s Law in Naturally Spoken SSE,
Stanford University
NWAV50 Conference | 14th October 2022


This talk provides a concise overview of my PhD project on Aitken’s Law. The study provides an in-depth account of the vowel duration patterns in 21st-century Scottish Standard English (SSE).
In contrast to all previous studies, this investigation is the first which analyzed all vowels of the Basic Scottish Vowel System (Abercrombie, 1979) in all possible contexts of scripted and unscripted naturally spoken SSE. The analysis accounted for relevant prosodic factors that can influence the duration of vocalic intervals and the sample was balanced in terms of the speakers’ age, gender and regional background.
I held this talk at the NWAV50 conference, which was hosted by the Linguistics Department of Stanford University. See slides below.



The Past, Present and Possible Future of Phonetic Research,
The University of Bern
Guest lecture | 2nd March 2023


This presentation shows how phonetic research has changed over the last centuries. Using the example of Aitken’s Law, the talk demonstrates how phonetic studies have changed from the first impressionistic accounts (e.g. Murray 1873, Sweet 1877), the first empirical studies in controlled speech (e.g. McClure 1977) to current investigations which investigate patterns in uncontrolled speech (e.g. Rathcke and Stuart-Smith 2016).
Apart from that, I also offer an overview of the latest speech technologies (e.g. IBM Watson, Montreal Forced Aligner 2.0) and how recent developments in AI may change the way we conduct phonetic investigations in the future (e.g. end-to-end modelling, OpenAI Whisper). I held this talk as a guest lecturer at the Department of English at the University of Bern following an invitation by Prof Dave Britain. See slides below.



SOME OF MY SCRIPTS


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MY HISTORY

Junior professor

June 2023

In May 2023, I was appointed as junior professor of English linguistics at the University of Koblenz, the youngest university in Germany. My current research interests are in the fields of sociophonetics, ASR technology, data processing as well as teacher education.

PhD

March 2023

From May 2019 until March 2023, I was a PhD student at TU Dortmund University (First supervisor and mentor: Prof Sarah Buschfeld | Second and external supervisor: Prof Edgar W. Schneider). I also became an affiliated staff member at the Glasgow Laboratory of Phonetics (GULP | Prof Jane Stuart-Smith). In my PhD project, I investigated the influence of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR) and the Voicing Effect (VE) in contemporary Standard Scottish English (SSE) on a countrywide scale. I submitted my thesis in December 2022 and defended it in March 2023.

M.Ed.

2019

After my B.A. degree, I continued my studies in Münster and became a research assistant at the Chair of English Linguistics (Prof. Gut) working in the ICE Scotland project. Due to this position, I developed a passion for phonetics and phonology and got keenly interested in Scottish English. I obtained an M.Ed. degree in February 2019.

BA

2016

I studied English, Geography and Educational Sciences at the University of Münster and obtained a B.A. in October 2016. Studying in the bicycle-friendly city of Münster was a lovely and enjoyable experience. I had a couple of student jobs, and I also became a student assistant at the English Department. Apart from that, I also worked at different schools in Germany and in the UK.