Summer scholars at the School of Culture, History and Language

Three summer scholars, Michael, Ciara and Praju with Shunichi
Three summer scholars, Michael, Ciara and Praju with Shunichi. Image: ANU

ANU Japan Institute's Associate Professor Shunichi Ishihara hosted summer scholar students in the Speech and Language Lab at the ANU School of Culture, History and Language (CHL) for nine weeks from November 2023 to January 2024. Out of the twelve students in total across the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, and the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Shunichi supervised three scholars this year, all of whom were fully funded. They worked on projects related to speech and language processing.

Michael Lambropoulos, a student from the University of Sydney majoring in computer science and linguistics, investigated the usefulness of a newly developed signal processing technique called ‘band-limited cepstrum’ for a more detailed phonetic-linguistic analysis of speech signals. He focused on the classification of Japanese vowels.

Praju Ghatpande, a computer science student from the University of New South Wales with a minor in Japanese, contributed to a larger project funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for the development of a forensic text comparison (FTC) system in Japanese. She played a key role in developing a baseline machine-learning-based FTC system.

Ciara Thompson, an ANU student majoring in linguistics and languages, investigated the extent to which a natural language generation system, such as ChatGPT, can mimic individuals’ writing styles. Her project is highly relevant to concerns related to ‘Deepfake’; AI-based technologies have been used for some criminal activities.

We extend our gratitude to the CHL for their continuous support of the summer scholar students. The program is particularly important to the School because some students decide to pursue their postgraduate degrees later at the ANU.

“The nine weeks are intense, but collaborating with such bright minds is always fruitful and rewarding,” says Shunichi. He hopes that they have experienced the excitement and joy of conducting research throughout the summer program.

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