Sarenne Wallbridge

Machine Learning PhD Fellow

University of Edinburgh, ILCC & CSTR

About Me

Update Janurary 2025 – I’ve defended my PhD thesis and am actively exploring new career opportunities. Reach out to chat!

I’m a research associate at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Speech Technology Research and Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, working with Catherine Lai and Peter Bell.

I’m interested in communication and how we use it efficiently. My current research investigates how information encoded in the lexical and non-lexical channels of spoken communication affects perception, and how we can leverage these findings to build more efficient, perceptually-motivated representations of speech and other multi-channel signals.

Translation: Spoken conversation is one of the most fundamental means we have for information transmission. How can we make use of information encoded in both [what words we say]_Lexical and [how we say them]_Non-lexical to better understand human communication and augment human-machine interaction?

In my spare time, I play, sing, and listen to music. I enjoy climbing moutains and rocks (whichever are closer!) and teaching yoga.

Before starting my PhD, I worked on several ML & NLP research teams across the UK, Denmark, and Germany. Check out my resumé for more details.

Interests

Speech Processing
Information Theory
Psycholinguistics
Machine Learning
Computational Linguistics
Natural Language Processing

Education

BSc (Hons) Cognitive Science, 2018

University of Edinburgh

News

01/2025: Our paper which was accepted at ICASSP!
07/2024: I had the joy of supervising Sean Leishman’s MInf thesis; we turned his experiments into a long paper which was accepted at SemDial!
07/2024: New pre-print! This work presents a new paradigm for computing predictability during incremental language comprehension.
06/2024: Our paper was accepted at Interspeech, reach out if you’ll be in Kos.
02/2024: I’m organising the Young Female Researchers in Speech workshop again at Interspeech 2024, reach out if you’re interested in applying!
01/2024: Presenting a talk at the Speech, Music and Hearing group (TMH) in KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
10/2023: Our paper was accepted to EMNLP, shiok!
06/2023: Joined REST-CL–thanks for the invitation!
05/2023: Our paper was accepted at Interspeech, see you in Dublin!
04/2023: I’ll be on a research visit at the Dialogue Modelling Group of ILLC in Amsterdam.
03/2023: Presenting a talk at the CLS in Universiteit van Amsterdam
01/2023: Our paper was accepted at EACL 2023, pozdrav ako si u Dubrovniku!
01/2023: I’m running a lecture series An Introduction to Neural Networks on the Speech & Language Processing MSc this term.
12/2022: Presenting a talk at SIGMEDIA in Trinity College Dublin.
09/2022: Awarded Best Student Paper at Interspeech 2022!
05/2022: Organiser for UK Speech in Edinburgh (9/22). Come and say hi!