Chng Eng Siong

CHNG Eng Siong is A/Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He graduated with a BEng (Hons) and PhD from Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, University of Edinburgh in 1991 and 1996 respectively. After graduating, Dr Chng worked briefly in RIKEN (Japan) as a post-doctoral research staff before joining Institute of System Science (ISS) (Singapore) from 1996-1999. In ISS, he was active in the area of online handwriting recognition and speech recognition systems with the Apple-ISS team. He subsequently joined Lernout and Hauspie (1999-2001) and continued working in speech research. From 2001-2002, he joined Knowles Electronics (www.knowles.com) as Research Manager for microphone array. He joined Nanyang Technological University in 2003. His current research interests include: machine learning, code-switch speech recognition, NLP and signal processing. To date, been Principal Investigator of several research grants awarded by Alibaba, Webank, AISG, NTU-Rolls Royce, Mindef, MOE and AStar with a total funding amount of over S$10 million under the Speech and Language Laboratory at SCSE, supervised (PhD Students)= 17 and supervised (MEng Students)= 10. Publications include 2 edited books and over 100 journal/conference papers. He has served as the publication chair for 5 international conferences (Human Agent Interaction 2016, INTERSPEECH 2014, APSIPA-2010, APSIPA-2011, ISCSLP-2006), and have been an associate editor for IEICE (special issue 2012), a reviewer for Speech Communications, Eupsico, IEEE Trans Man,System and Cybernectics Part B, Journal of Signal Processing System, ACM Multimedia Systems, IEEE Trans Neural Network, IEEE Trans CAS-II, and Signal Processing.

Emotional expressions of bilingual speakers in spontaneous speech: Evidence from Singapore English 

Following significant advancements made in the field of automatic speech recognition, the next milestone in developing computer applications that can understand human speech is speech emotion recognition (SER), that is, detecting emotional cues in speech signals. Much of the progress in the field so far has been spurred on by modelling emotions from acted data, primarily from speakers in Western societies. Little is currently understood of emotions occurring in natural conversations; even less when considering how expressions of emotions differ among multicultural and multilingual speakers in Asia. In this talk, I present findings of the various ways in which anger and happiness are communicated in spontaneous speech obtained from dyadic audio recordings of Singapore English speakers of Chinese, Malay, or Indian ethnicities engaging in a co-operative game. The implications of the findings on SER research are also discussed.