Hi, I’m Hao. I am a Lecturer in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh. I am also affiliated with the Centre for Speech Technology Research. I work in the field of speech and language processing, studying models that can tell who says what at when and where.
For prospective students
If you want to pursue a PhD and are interested in working with me, please get in touch (hao.tang@ed.ac.uk) and I’m happy to hear about your research interest. I can take students from both the ILCC PhD program and the CDT in Reponsible NLP.
Research
My current research interest revolves around speech representations, data structures that speech systems use to solve tasks.
- Our recent study of autoregressive predictive coding (Yang et al., 2022) includes both analyses and algorithms for learning speech representations.
- Analyses of self-supervised speech models include
- orthogonality of phonetic and speaker spaces (Liu et al., 2023)
- phonetic properties in discrete codes (Wells et al., 2022)
- word representations of speech (Sanabria et al., 2022; Sanabria et al., 2023)
- Algorithms that make use of discrete structures include
- frame representations of speech (Chung et al., 2020; Yeh and Tang; 2022)
- string representations of speech (Yeh and Tang; 2023)
- tree representations for paraphrasing and summarization (Hosking et al., 2022; Hosking et al., 2023)
About me
I started working in speech and language as a master student with Lin-Shan Lee at National Taiwan University, and have stayed in this field since then. I spent wonderful years doing PhD with Karen Livescu at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Before coming to Edinburgh, I was a post-doctoral associate at MIT in the Spoken Language Systems group led by Jim Glass.
Feel free to reach out (hao.tang@ed.ac.uk) if you have any questions about me and my work. I am always happy to hear from students and colleagues who are interested in speech and language.