Research Interests

Automatic speech recognition; Text-to-speech; Speaker recognition; Language recognition; Speech enhancement and separation; Audio event/scene classification; Music information processing; Hearing aids and cochlear implants; Pathological speech processing; Communication and cognitive disorders.

Technology Transfer

• Spoken language technologies: CUCorpora, CUCall, CURSBB, CUTalk, CU2C, CUMIX, CUProsody.
• Personalized hearing devices: ACEHearing, AumeoAudio, Heari
• Computerized version of Cantonese basic speech perception test (CBSPT)
• CANtonese DIsyllabic Word Identification Test in Noise - Adaptive [CANDIWIT-N-A],

Funded Projects (recent)

• Personalized Storytelling System Based on Expressive Voice Creation by Deep Learning, HK$1,361,600 by Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF), 2019 - 2020.
• Unsupervised Speech Modeling for Low-Resource Languages, HK$ 675.647 by RGC General Research Fund, 2017 - 2019
• Development of Computer-based Tools for Clinical Assessment of Speech, Hearing and Language Disabilities, HK$ 1,384,000 by Innovation and Technology Fund (Tier 3 scheme), 2015 - 2016.
• Objective Assessment of Pathological Voices based on Acoustic Signal Analysis and Classification, HK$ 500,000 by RGC General Research Fund, 2015 - 2017.
• Periodicity Enhancement and Phonemic Restoration for Improving Speech Perception by Hearing Impaired Listeners, HK$ 922,000 by RGC General Research Fund, 2012 - 2014.
• Developing a hands-free electrolarynx of natural sound quality for Chinese-speaking laryngectomees, HK$ 1,476,000 by RGC General Research Fund, 2011 - 2013.

Selected Recent Publications

1. Jiarui Wang, Si Ioi Ng, Dehua Tao, Wing Yee Ng and Tan Lee, "A study on acoustic modeling for child speech based on multi-task learning," in Proceedings of ISCSLP 2018, Taipei, November 2018.
2. Man-Ling Sung, Siyuan Feng and Tan Lee, "Unsupervised pattern discovery from thematic speech archives based on multilingual bottleneck features," in Proceedings of APSIPA ASC 2018, Honolulu, pp.1448-1455, November 2018.
3. Siyuan Feng and Tan Lee, "Exploiting speaker and phonetic diversity of mismatched language resources for unsupervised subword modeling," in Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2018, Hyderabad, India, pp. 2673-2677, September 2018.
4. Hong Zhang, Mark Liberman and Tan Lee, "Information structure and prosodic prominence: how does sentence final particle affect Cantonese intonation?"  in Proceedings of  Speech Prosody 2018, Poznań, Poland, pp.903-907, June 13-16, 2018.
5. Yuzhong Wu and Tan Lee, "Reducing model complexity for DNN based large-Scale audio classification," in Proceedings of ICASSP 2018, pp. 331-335, Calgary, Canada, April 15-20, 2018.
6. Ying Qin, Tan Lee and Anthony Pak Hin Kong, "Automatic speech assessment for aphasic patients based on syllable-level embedding and supra-segmental duration features," in Proceedings of ICASSP 2018, pp. 5994-5998, Calgary, Canada, April 2018.
7. Hansjörg Mixdorff, Angelika Hönemann, Albert Rilliard, Tan Lee and Matthew K.H. Ma, "Audio-visual expressions of attitude: How many different attitudes can perceivers decode ?" Speech Communication, Vol.95, pp.114-126, December 2017.
8. Xurong Xie, Xunying Liu, Tan Lee and Lan Wang, "RNN-LDA clustering for feature based DNN adaptation," in Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2017, Stockholm, SWEDEN, Stockholm, SWEDEN, pp. 2396-2400, August 20-24, 2017.
9. Yuanyuan Liu, Tan Lee, P. C. Ching, Thomas K.T. Law and Kathy Y.S. Lee, "Acoustic assessment of disordered voice with continuous speech based on utterance-level ASR posterior features," in Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2017, Stockholm, SWEDEN, pp. 2680-2684, August 20-24, 2017.
10. Lufei Gao, Li Su, Yi-Hsuan Yang and Tan Lee, "Polyphonic piano note transcription with non-negative matrix factorization of differential spectrogram," Proceedings of ICASSP, pp. 291-295, New Orleans, USA, March 2017.
11. Anna Chi Shan Kam, , John Ka Keung Sung, Tan Lee, Terence Ka Cheong Wong and Andrew van Hasselt, "Improving mobile phone speech recognition by personalized amplification: application in people with normal hearing and mild-to-moderate hearing loss," Ear and Hearing, Vol.38, No.2, 2017.