Human Language Technologies (HLT) - Current group members

Aditi Sharmais a Researcher in the HLT Research Group. She obtained her B Eng: Computer Engineering degree in 2005 from the University of Pretoria (UP) and is currently enrolled for the Masters in Technology Management programme at UP. In the HLT Research Group her work involves research in the field of User Interface Design (specifically voice interfaces) and Human Factors thereof, for the developing world, as well as relevant HLT-based applications and Human Computer Interaction aspects for this part of the world.

Research interests: Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design, Usability Testing and Human Factors.

Publications

Brian Khambane was appointed in the HLT research group on a Linguistic intern from 5 January 2009. He completed a BA in Industrial Psychology at the University of Witwatersrand. Brian’s current responsibilities in the HLT research group are centred on creating pronunciation dictionaries, recording & collection of audio data, transcriptions, proofreading, dialogue creation, editing spreadsheets and dictionaries. He is working on the LWAZI, ASR and Starter (Auto-sec) Projects.

Research Interests: Human/machine interaction with regard to language proficiency; the effects on work performance and/or productivity.

Carmen Moors is the research group’s Office Manager. She manages the group's administrative systems and co-ordinates specific projects. She holds a BTech in Office Management and Technology (TUT) and is currently busy with a BA in Human and Social Science with specialisation in Development Studies. She has a keen interest in all spheres of development, supported by her previous working experience and current field of study.

Christiaan Kuun is a Project Engineer in the HLT research group. He obtained his B.Eng degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria in 2005. His current work revolves around managing projects within the HLT research group and the SANReN Project. Apart from his work, he takes a keen interest in surfing, politics, business and public speaking.

Elsie Mosenye is a Group Assistant in the HLT Unit. She obtained her National Diploma in Commercial Administration from Technikon SA (TSA) in 2002, and completed her B-tech in Management in 2007 from the University of South Africa (UNISA). Elsie has been HLT since September 2008.

Febe de Wet is a researcher at the Stellenbosch University Centre for Language and Speech Technology. She joined the HLT research group in January 2009 by means of a secondment agreement between Stellenbosch University and the Meraka Institute. Febe devotes her Meraka time to: supervision of PhD students, research on the use of ASR for pronunciation training in CALL and the development of a large vocabulary ASR system for Afrikaans. Febe holds a PhD from the Radboud University in Nijmegen (The Netherlands).

Research Interests: Statistical pattern recognition, automatic speech recognition, South African English and the application of automatic speech recognition in oral proficiency assessment and computer assisted language learning.

Georg Schlunz was appointed in the HLT research group on a Masters studentship from 5 January 2009. He completed a BEngSc in Computer Systems at the University of Stellenbosch. His areas of work are in Text-to-speech (TTS), since his Masters research topic is in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for TTS.

Research Interests: Speech and Language Processing as a whole – from an engineering perspective (the development of systems around ASR, TTS and Machine Translation).

Gerhard van Huyssteen joined the HLT research group, as Research Group Leader in October 2008. Gerhard holds a PhD in Linguistics from the North-West University. His current research in the HLT research group focuses mainly on HLT resources for closely-related languages. He is also continuing with his other interests in Cognitive grammar and Afrikaans morphology, where a number of students from NWU are under his supervision, while still being active in research himself.

Research Interests: Natural Language Processing (NLP), Cognitive Grammar, Afrikaans Morphology.

Publications

Jama Ndwe is a PhD student in HLT. He obtained a B.S. (computer engineering) at Wentworth Institute of Technology in 1995 and MSc (computer science) at Rhodes University in 2002. He has worked as an engineer at Telkom and a faculty member at the Walter Sisulu University. His research is on usability engineering of speech interfaces.

Research interests: Usability engineering, ergonomics, and cognitive science.

Publications

Johan Zwane is currently working as an intern at Meraka which he joined from February 2010. His responsibilities are centred on recording and collection of audio data, working with svn, submitting and extracting script from svn, put all the scripts from the auto-sec week into svn. run python scripts to extract data from the google project, assisting in creation of pronounciation dictionaries, editing spreadsheets, assisting in supervising student who will be collecting data, assisting in quality control process with regard to data. He is currently involved with the Google voice collection project.

Karen Calteaux has been appointed as operations manager of the HLT research group from June 2009. She received her DLitt et Phil in Sociolinguistics from the Rand Afrikaans University for research relating to language variation in Black urban communities. Her earlier degrees, also from RAU, were obtained in the African Languages Department. Karen has been involved in language-related research and development projects since 1988, having managed a countrywide research project on standard and non-standard African languages for the HSRC from 1989 to 1996. After travelling extensively abroad, Karen managed the projects of the status language planning focus area of the Pan South African Language Board from 2000 to 2001. For the past eight years, Karen has been responsible for establishing and managing the language unit of the South African Police Service, with the aim of improving service delivery through the rendering of a professional multilingual language service.

Professional interests: personal excellence, team excellence, management excellence, service excellence.

Marelie Davel is a principal researcher in the HLT research group. She received her PhD in Electronic Engineering from the University of Pretoria for research related to pronunciation modelling during the localisation of HLT systems. Her earlier degrees (in Computer Science and Mathematics) were obtained from the University of Stellenbosch and the University of London. Marelie has been involved in research and development projects at the CSIR since 1995. In 2002, Marelie spent a year as a visiting scientist with the speech group at Carnegie Mellon University, before returning to South Africa to assist with the establishment of the HLT Research Group. She was the group’s research group leader from 2003 to 2008.

Research interests: language localisation; acoustic and language model adaptation; bootstrapping; grapheme-to-phoneme prediction.

Maritali Tempest joined the HLT research group as a software developer in August 2008. Maritali holds BEng in Electric and Electronic Engineering from the University of Stellenbosch.

Research Interests: Man-machine interaction

Marius Peché Marius Peche is a Master’s student at the HLT Research Group. He obtained his B.Sc IT degree in 2004 and his Honours degree in Computer Science in 2005, both from the Rand Academic University. His Honours degree included subjects such as Biometrics and Artificial Intelligence.

Research interests: Speech recognition, AI search algorithms. Other interests: Nature, Outdoor Activities (such as hiking and rowing).

Mpho Kgampe is an intern linguist in the HLT research group. She is a BTech Students at Tshwane University of Technology in language practice.

Publications

Mpho Raborife is currently pursuing her honours degree in computational linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, with her final script focusing on tone modeling for TTS. She was a bursar in the HLT group, and joined the group full-time in January 2010 as a Master's student.

Nathi Mqalo is an HLT Research Assistant. She obtained her B.A degree in Psychology at the University of Western Cape. Her interest lies in the interaction between humans and technology.

Research Interests: Psychology and human factors in IT systems.

Neil Kleynhans obtained his B.Eng in Electronic Engineering at the University of Pretoria in 2003. He is working in the HLT research group where he is busy with his honours degree, with an aim to achieve his masters degree. He is planning to focus his research on speaker verification for e-Gov services.

Research interest: Pattern recognition

Olwethu Qwabe was appointed in the HLT research group as a social sciences intern from 5 January 2009. She completed a BTech in Information Technology at the Walter Sisulu University. Prior to Meraka, Olwethu worked as an intern at SITA where she trained a systems developer, she also worked as a Junior Business Analyst in the finance sector. Since joining Meraka, she has been working with the LWAZI application selection team on identifying and implementing the projects’ pilot.

Research Interests: Research on Human Computer Interaction and Bridging the Information Gap.

Richard Carlson is a research associate of the HLT Research Group. He obtained a degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas in 1996. He went on to work on games and multimedia applications until joining Gracenote in 2000 where he worked on high transaction music information servers until 2004. Since then he has been working on low-cost open source software solutions that help increase access to information for users in developing regions. Currently based in the USA, Richard is a senior developer working with the group on a full-time basis.

Tebogo Gumede is a Social Scientist with a background in Health systems and health policy research. Her previous work include the evaluation of the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV/AIDS (PMTCT), investigation of backstreet abortions post the passing of CTOP act, investigation of health cost coping strategies of rural households, investigating the surviving strategies of health care workers in the wake of increased work loads and teaching qualitative research methods. She is currently the team leader for application selection teams at the MERAKA institute.

Publications

Thipe Modipa was appointed in the HLT research group on a PhD studentship from 5 January 2009. He completed an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Limpopo. He is currently searching for a relevant topic for his PhD.

Research Interests: Automatic Speech Recognition, Pronunciation of Proper names.

Tshepo Moganedi was appointed in the HLT research group as an intern in both Software Development and Testing. He obtained a BSc degree in computer science in 2008 from the University of Limpopo.

Research Interests: Human language technology, Speech recognition into the open source telephony system and Interactive voice response application.

Zuko Fani is currently working with the HLT research group on a masters thesis related to speech synthesis. He received his B.Eng (Hons) degree in Computer Engineering in 2007 from the University of Pretoria. He is currently enrolled at the University of Pretoria on a part-time basis.

Research interests: pattern recognition and data mining.