About Me
- Currently completing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in personalised speech synthesis for atypical voices. I am also part of the CSTR and ILCC departments.
- Lecturer in NLP and speech technologies at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, at the Postgraduate Course in Deep Learning program.
- Tutor in speech technology courses at the University of Edinburgh.
- Part of the committee at Young IT Girls, and in charge of the activities team.
Research Interests
I am interested in speech technologies, natural language processing, acoustics and language acquisition.
In particular, I focus on personalised speech synthesis for atypical voices, TTS evaluation and the intersectionality between gender and speech technologies.
I am very open to collaborations, don't hesitate to reach out!
Career
- 2023-present: PhD researcher at the Centre for Doctoral Training in NLP at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). Member of the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR).
- 2023-present: Tutor at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). Courses: Automatic Speech Recognition (2023), Speech Processing (2024-present), Speech Synthesis (2025-present), Professional Issues (2024-present), MSc Speech and Language Processing programme-level tutoring (2024-present).
- 2022-present: Lecturer and lab support (NLP and Speech) at the Posgraduate in Deep Learning at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (online and in person editions).
- 2019-2023: TTS Research Scientist at Amazon (Cambridge, England, and Edinburgh, Scotland).
- 2018-2019: TTS Language Engineer Intern at Amazon (Gdańsk, Poland).
- 2017-2018: MSc Speech and Language Processing with Distinction at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland).
- 2017: BSc dissertation conducted as an Erasmus student at the University of Limerick (Ireland).
- 2013-2017: BSc Audiovisual Systems Engineering at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Barcelona).
Publications
- Sanchez, A., Ross, A., Markl, N. (2024) Beyond the Binary: Limitations and Possibilities of Gender-related Speech Technology Research. Proc. IEEE Spoken Language Technology (SLT) Workshop 2024. Link to paper.
- Sanchez, A., Falai, A., Zhang, Z., Angelini, O., Yanagisawa, K. (2022) Unify and Conquer: How Phonetic Feature Representation Affects Polyglot Text-To-Speech (TTS). Proc. Interspeech 2022, 2963-2967, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2022-233. Link to paper.
- Zhang, Z., Falai, A., Sanchez, A., Angelini, O., Yanagisawa, K. (2022) Mix and Match: An Empirical Study on Training Corpus Composition for Polyglot Text-To-Speech (TTS). Proc. Interspeech 2022, 2353-2357, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2022-242. Link to paper.
- Deja, K., Sanchez, A., Roth, J., Cotescu, M. (2022) Automatic Evaluation of Speaker Similarity. Proc. Interspeech 2022, 2348-2352, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2022-75. Link to paper.
- Luque, J., Segura, C., Sanchez, A., Umbert, M., & Galindo, L. A. (2017). The Role of Linguistic and Prosodic Cues on the Prediction of Self-Reported Satisfaction in Contact Centre Phone Calls. In INTERSPEECH (pp. 2346-2350). Link to paper.
- Sanchez, A. (2017). Effects of room acoustics on players' perceptions in audio games (Bachelor's thesis, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya). Link to thesis.
Conferences, Talks and Poster Sessions
- Sanchez, A., Jones, J., Verdugo, J. (2024) To listen or not to listen? A quasi-experimental study on reading-only versus reading-while-listening for incidental vocabulary learning in L2 Spanish learners at different levels of lexical proficiency. British Association for Applied Linguistics Conference 2024 (Essex, UK).
- Sanchez, A., King, S. (2024) Self-supervised models for dysarthric speech: Understanding representations through visual analysis and probing. UK and Ireland Speech Workshop 2024, Cambridge. Link to abstract (page 47).
- 2022-2023 - Guest lecture on TTS research at Alexa at the Postgraduate Course in Deep Learning at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya.
- 2018-2023 - Various talks on TTS research at Alexa at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Barcelona), University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, and Universidad de Costa Rica.
Other media
Other interests
In my free time, I like reading, playing videogames, playing the violin, going to concerts and going to the gym.
I am also an amateur embroiderer and soon-to-be potter!
I am currently learning Japanese and on my journey for a Shotokan Karate black belt (current belt: purple).
Contact
Email: ariadna dot sanchez at ed dot ac dot uk
LinkedIn: Ariadna Sanchez
Twitter/X: @SCAriadna