ASSTA Committees
The ASSTA Committees
ASSTA supports a number of committees to provide leadership in various areas of concern to the Association. The current set of commitees are as follows:
- The National Spoken Language Database (NSLD) committee which is responsible for the promotion of Australian spoken language data collection, and has spawned the ANDOSL project.
- The Forensic Speech Science Committee (FSSC) which is responsible for exploring Forensic Speaker Identification Standards on behalf of the Association.
NSLD Committee
The National Spoken Language Database standing committee is the oldest ASSTA committee. It was established in 1990 to encourage and seek to coordinate the development of high quality databases of spoken language data. The terms of reference of the NSLD committee included the coordination of the creation of a national database of spoken language in Australia; the generation of publicity about the need for structured and easily accessible spoken language data among the research community and its potential funding bodies; the encouragement of all speech scientists and technologists in Australia to support this project; and the development of cooperation with similar endeavours overseas.
The Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL) was a 3 year programme involving speaker selection, data collection, data analysis, data annotation, data management, description and dissemination, which utilised expertise on four sites and the Australian Academic Research Network (AARNET). The aim of the project was to provide a core database of English spoken in Australia using as few speakers as possible while still obtaining representative data. The language corpus contains both phonetically rich read speech and a spontaneous speech task (map task) with a focused vocabulary. Speakers were selected from well defined phonological clusters which included both the well recognised varieties of Australian English and, initially, two forms of accented Australian English. The data from this project will be continuously enhanced by additional material and additional annotation.
The committee is active in promoting new spoken language data resources which can be made available to the research community in technically compatible formats.
Committee:
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Chair:
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Professor Michael Wagner |
Australian National University |
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Members:
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Professor Jonathan Harrington |
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität |
| Assoc Prof Steve Cassidy |
Macquarie University |
| Dr. Julie Vonwiller |
Appen Butler Hill |
| Assoc Prof Steven Bird |
Charles Darwin University |
Contact: michael.wagner@canberra.edu.au
Forensic Speech Science Committee (FSSC)
Forensic Speech Science is the application of speech science to legal contexts. For example, it can:
- contribute useful information to criminal investigations;
- assist in the improvement of legal processes, by informing legal practitioners and law enforcement agencies of scientifically appropriate handling of speech evidence;
- assist courts of law in making factually correct decisions by revealing the information that speech evidence contains.
It is important to note that most of us in the hearing community tend to take speech communication for granted. After all, we speak to - and understand - each other daily. We recognise our friends' voices. So, one may ask why we need expert knowledge in this area, rather than just our 'common sense.'
The answer is simple. Human speech and our perception of it are far more complex processes than many of us realise. Many external factors affect how we speak and hear: noise, social settings, speech style, emotion, prejudice, contextual knowledge and familiarity with a particular variety of language. All can mislead us - to hear things that are not said, or to misidentify the owner of a voice. Speech evidence needs to be handled in a scientific and transparent way, founded on specialist knowledge, such as linguistics, signal processing, and statistics.
The ASSTA Forensic Speech Science Committee promotes scientific research and communication, and cross-disciplinary collaboration to further development this field. Subfields of forensic speech science research include:
- forensic voice comparison;
- forensic transcription;
- speaker profiling;
- assessing the contents of disputed speech recordings;
- language assessment in asylum procedures;
- assessing whether audio evidence has been tampered with.
Dr Yuko Kinoshita (Deputy Chair)
Dr Kinoshita is a researcher in linguistics, and a lecturer in Japanese and linguistics at The Australian National University. Her main research interest is in forensic phonetics, focussed on linguistically-informed forensic voice comparison under likelihood-based evaluation frameworks. She recently extended her interest area to speech perception and its impact on legal processes, in collaboration with Professor Helen Fraser.
In addition to her research practice, Yuko has been actively engaging in forensic linguistics education. She teaches a large introductory forensic linguistics course at ANU, where she guides her students to discover the complexity of language and communication, their interaction with justice systems, and effects on civil society.
She also regularly provides several law enforcement agencies with advice and consultancy services in forensic voice comparison.
Prof Michael Wagner
Michael Wagner received his Diplomphysiker degree from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich with a thesis on the computer simulation of an elementary-particle spectrometer in 1973 and his PhD in computer science from the Australian National University with a thesis on the acoustic-phonetic analysis of speaker characteristics in 1979. He is Managing Director of the National Centre for Biometric Studies, Honorary Professor at the Technical University Berlin and at the ANU, and Emeritus Professor of the University of Canberra. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia, a Life Member of the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, and a Life Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He was Professor of Computing and Head of the School of Computing at the University of Canberra, Professor of Computing Science at the University of the South Pacific, and held other research and teaching positions at Technical University of Munich, National University of Singapore, Nixdorf AG, University of Wollongong, Australian National University and University of New South Wales/Australian Defence Force Academy.
Michael's main research interest has been in speech science and technology and he was the Foundation President of ASSTA and a Board Member of ISCA. Since 2010, his research interest has been focussed on biometrics, and he leads a spin-off company engaged in research and consulting in forensic speaker recognition. He is the author of more than 200 publications in the field of speech science and technology.
Dr Debbie Loakes Dr. Loakes holds a doctorate from the University of Melbourne, where she is working as a Research Fellow in the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence. Her 2006 Ph.D. thesis examined the speech patterns of identical and non-identical twins - the extended abstract is available here. You can also read more about Debbie's interest in forensics over the years via this blog post.
As well as forensic speaker comparison, Dr. Loakes' research interests include the phonetics of Australian English, Aboriginal English and Aboriginal languages. She also has casework experience in contested utterances. One of her recent publications about Australian English can be seen here.