Recent posts

I’m thrilled to that our project, “Speech entrainment during socialbot conversations“, has been funded with an Amazon Research Grant ($46,485). PI: Georgia Zellou, co-PI: Michelle Cohn.

Two upcoming presentations at the 2021 Linguistics Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting:

• Eleonora Beier, Michelle Cohn, Fernanda Ferreira, & Georgia Zellou: Prosodic focus in human- versus voice-AI-directed speech (Saturday, January 9, 2021 – 11:00am to 12:30pm)
• Riley Stray, Michelle Cohn, & Georgia Zellou: The Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Usage Factors in Dialect Intelligibility in Noise (Saturday, January 9, 2021 – 2:00pm to 3:30pm)

Check out the new UC Davis Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Research Group website (now hosted by UCD Sitefarm).

https://hciresearchgroup.sf.ucdavis.edu/

In Fall 2020, I launched the UC Davis HCI Research Group: a collective of professors, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate students across campus investigating the dynamics of human-computer interaction. 

We have a quarterly talk series (on Zoom):

​Fall Quarter 2020

To join the mailing list to receive updates and the Zoom links, please email Michelle Cohn (mdcohn@ucdavis.edu) ​​

We are thrilled to have several papers accepted to the 2020 Interspeech conference:

• Cohn, M., & Zellou, G. “Perception of concatenative vs. neural text-to-speech (TTS): Differences in intelligibility in noise and language attitudes”
• Cohn, M., Sarian, M., Predeck, K., & Zellou, G. “Individual variation in language attitudes toward voice-AI: The role of listeners’ autistic-like traits”
• Zellou, G., & Cohn, M. “Social and functional pressures in vocal alignment: Differences for human and voice-AI interlocutors”

Including one for the new collaboration between UC Davis and Saarland University:

• Cohn, M., Raveh, E., Predeck, K., Gessinger, I., Möbius, B., Zellou, G. “Differences in Gradient Emotion Perception: Human vs. Alexa Voices”

Embodiment and gender interact in alignment to TTS voices (CogSci 2020)

UC Davis-KTH Collaboration:

Michelle Cohn (UCD), Patrik Jonell (KTH), Taylor Kim (UCD), Jonas Beskow (KTH), Georgia Zellou (UCD)

We are thrilled that three of our papers have been accepted to the 2020 Cognitive Science Society Meeting!

• Cohn, M., Jonell, P., Kim, T., Beskow, J., Zellou, G. Embodiment and gender interact in alignment to TTS voices.

• Zellou, G., & Cohn, M. Top-down effects of apparent humanness on vocal alignment toward human and device interlocutors.

• Zellou, G., Cohn, M., Block, A. Top-down effect of speaker age guise on perceptual compensation for coarticulatory /u/-fronting.

This year’s Picnic Day is going 100% digital in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, a small team of talented RAs (Patty Sandoval, Julian Rambob, Mia Gong, and Marlene Andrade) helped me create Virtual Booth videos!

See the other Virtual Picnic Day events here!

We’ll present two projects at the annual Linguistic Society of America (LSA) meeting in January:

• California listeners’ patterns of partial compensation for coarticulatory /u/-fronting is influenced by the apparent age of the speaker (Aleese Block, Michelle Cohn, Georgia Zellou)
  

• Conversational role influences speech alignment toward digital assistant and human voices (Georgia Zellou, Michelle Cohn, Tyler Kline, Bruno Ferenc Segedin)

Congrats to the Gunrock team, led by Prof. Zhou Yu, for our demo paper acceptance at the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Hong Kong!

Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations
Dian Yu, Michelle Cohn, Yi Mang Yang, Chun Yen Chen, Weiming Wen, Jiaping Zhang, Mingyang Zhou, Kevin Jesse, Austin Chau, Antara Bhowmick, Shreenath Iyer, Giritheja Sreenivasulu, Sam Davidson, Ashwin Bhandare and Zhou Yu [pdf]

You can see our system demonstration (2 minute video):