C H R I S T I N A  L.  B E N N E T T

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CONTACT INFORMATION

Mail:	Language Technologies Institute
	Carnegie Mellon University
	5000 Forbes Avenue
	Pittsburgh, PA  15213
Email: 	cbennett@cs.cmu.edu
Web:   	www.cs.cmu.edu/~cbennett

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EDUCATION

- University of Texas at Austin:  1993 – 1997
     o Graduation Date: December 20, 1997
     o Degree:  B.A. Linguistics/English
     o GPA and Honors information available by request
- Carnegie Mellon University:  2001 – 2003
     o Masters Graduation Date: May 18, 2003
     o Degree:  M.S. in Language Technologies
     o Masters Thesis Topic:  Personalization of synthetic voices by learning speaker-specific pronunciation habits
- Carnegie Mellon University:  2003 – present
     o PhD student in Language Technologies Institute
     o Expected Graduation Date: 2007

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TECHNICAL SKILLS

- Linguistic Experience:
     o Spectrogram Reading
     o Phonetic Transcription (IPA, NA, DARPA)
     o Phonological Rule Writing
     o Historical Language Change Rule Derivations
     o X-Bar Theory
     o Coursework: Phonetics, Phonology, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, Syntax, American English, English Grammar, History of the English Language, Sociolinguistics of Latin America, Romani Language and Culture, Language and the Law, Language and the Brain, Speech Science, Old English, graduate level Phonetics

- Language Technology Experience:
     o Dialog Systems
          - Data analysis and management
          - Dialog Management
     o Speech synthesis techniques
     o C++, Perl, VoiceXML, and HTML programming
     o Semantic and Syntactic Grammars
     o Coursework: Speech:PPPS, Speech Recognition, Speech Lab, Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, Grammars and Lexicons, Formal Knowledge Representation, Formal Semantics, LT for CALL, Software Engineering for IT, Machine Translation, Language and Statistics

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TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Teaching Assistant, Fall 2004
   Course: Grammars and Lexicons
   Instructors: Lori Levin and Teruko Mitamura
   Carnegie Mellon University, Language Technologies Institute

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WORK EXPERIENCE

Carnegie Mellon University, Language Technologies Institute
August 1998 to August 2001
Position:  Research Assistant, Communicator Project
Full time
Responsibilities:
- Management of Data Transcription Effort
- Error Analysis of CMU Communicator Dialog System Logs
- Maintenance of System Dictionary and Grammar
- Periodic Maintenance of Databases and NLG

Additional work history available upon request. 

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PUBLICATIONS

Bennett, C. L., "Large Scale Evaluation of Corpus-based Synthesizers: Results and Lessons from the Blizzard Challenge 2005," In Proceedings of Interspeech 2005 - Eurospeech, Lisbon, Portugal, 2005. 

Kominek, J., Bennett, C., Langner, B., and Toth, A., "The Blizzard Challenge 2005 CMU Entry, a method for improving speech synthesis systems," In Proceedings of Interspeech 2005 - Eurospeech, Lisbon, Portugal, 2005. 

Bennett, C. L. and Black, A. W., "Prediction of Pronunciation Variations for Speech Synthesis: A Data-driven Approach," In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2005. 

Bennett, C. L. and Black, A. W., "Using Acoustic Models to Choose Pronunciation Variations for Synthetic Voices," In Proceedings of Eurospeech, Geneva, Switzerland, 2003.

Kominek, J., Bennett, C., and Black, A. W., "Evaluating and Correcting Phoneme Segmentation for Unit Selection Synthesis," In Proceedings of Eurospeech, Geneva, Switzerland, 2003. 

Bennett, C. and Rudnicky, A. I., "The Carnegie Mellon Communicator Corpus," In Proceedings of the International Conference of Spoken Language Processing, Denver, Colorado, 2002.

Bennett, C., Font Llitjos, A., Shriver, S., Rudnicky, A., and Black, A. W., "Building VoiceXML-Based Applications," In Proceedings of the International Conference of Spoken Language Processing, Denver, Colorado, 2002.

Bennett, C., "A Comparative Analysis of DARPA Communicator Systems," Presentation at DARPA Communicator PI Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, July 2001. 

Rudnicky, A., Bennett, C., Black, A., Chotimongkol, A., Lenzo, K., Oh, A., Singh, R., "Task and Domain Specific Modelling in the Carnegie Mellon Communicator System," In Proceedings of the International Conference of Spoken Language Processing, Beijing, China, 2000.

Eskenazi, M., Rudnicky, A., Gregory, K., Constantinides, P., Brennan, R., Bennett, C., Allen, J., "Data Collection and Processing in the Carnegie Mellon Communicator," In Proceedings of the Eurospeech Conference, Budapest, Hungary, 1999.

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REFERENCES

Available upon request