Nick Campbell

SFI Stokes Professor of Speech & Communication Technology

Research Interests

My background is in experimental psychology and linguistics, but most of my recent experience is in speech technology. I prefer corpus-based approaches and have pioneered advanced (and paradigm-shifting) methods of speech synthesis and natural conversational speech data collection in a multimodal context. My current interest is in processing social interaction and discourse for modelling human-computer dialogues. I am working to develop an interactive speech-based human-machine interface for social networks, customer-services, games, and robotics, while trying to understand how humans perform such often perfect communication.

Selected Publications

• Nick Campbell, "Tracking the second channel of information in speech", IEEE International workshop on Social Signal Processing, Amsterdam, September , 2009. This Keynote Talk helped start off the Social Signal Processing initiative that is now breaking much new ground.
• Nick Campbell, "Getting to the heart of the matter; speech as the expression of affect; rather than just text or language", Language Resources and Evaluation, 39, (1), 2005, p109 - 118 - This journal paper best expresses my views on speech as social interaction.
• Nick Campbell, "Expressive Speech Processing and Prosody Engineering: An Illustrated Essay on the Fragmented Nature of Real Interactive Speech", in Fang Chen & Kristiina Jokinen's , Speech Technology Theory and Applications, New York Dordrech tHeidelberg London, Springer, 2010, pp105 - 120 - This book chapter describes the interface between speech and engineering.
• Tanaka Hiroki & Nick Campbell, "Acoustic features of four types of laughter in natural conversational speech", ICPhS, Hong Kong, China, 17-21 August 2011 - this recent conference paper from my Japanese lab addresses an important social aspect of human spoken interaction.
• Esposito, Anna, Campbell, Nick, Vogel, Carl., Hussain, Amir, Nijholt, Anton (eds), Development of Multimodal Interfaces; Active Listening & Synchrony, Berlin, Springer, 2010, XVII, 446pp - this book arose from a summer school I co-organised in TCD after my arrival and includes many excellent papers related to the above research.
• Please see http://people.tcd.ie/nick for a more comprehensive list
  

Teaching/Supervision

As a Research Professor responsible for the Speech Communication Lab in 7-9 South Leinster Street, I spend much of my time working with PhD students and PostDocs as well as visiting researchers putting together technology for advanced speech processing, but I also give occasional lectures to graduate students in the Centre. I have co-supervised PhD students from the Computer Science Department and History, and work closely with graduate students in UCD and DCU as part of my connection with the CNGL CSET. I still maintain my links with Japan as a Visiting Professor at NAIST.

Nick Campbell on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Centre for Language and Communication Studies
Room 3040 Arts Building
Trinity College
Dublin 2.

Telephone: +353 1 896 1626
Fax: +353 1 896 2941
Email: nick@tcd.ie