Summer Scholars hosted by Shunichi Ishihara at the School of Culture, History and Language

Following previous years, two summer research scholars are being hosted in the forensic stream of the Speech and Language Lab during the summer periods of 2025 and 2026. This year, two students, Carol Zhang and Harshit Gupta, are participating in the program with full support from the ANU School of Culture, History and Language. Both students are working on specific components of a large research project titled Forensic Analysis of Linguistic Evidence, funded by multiple sources, including Japan’s Kakenhi. They are under the supervision of Professor Shun Ishihara.

Carol Zhang is a master’s student in General and Applied Linguistics. Her research investigates where speaker-specific information is encoded in fricatives across the spectral domain and to what extent. For this work, she applies a newly developed signal processing technique from the lab—the band-limited cepstral coefficient (BLCC) method—using a large Japanese speech database. Carol is co-supervised by Professor Frantz Clermont, a member of the lab.

Harshit is a master’s student in Advanced Computing. His summer project focuses on evaluating the ability of generative AI models to mimic individual writing styles. He is experimenting with several models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and DeepSeek. He also plans to explore optimisation strategies for authorship mimicry, including model fine-tuning, prompt design, and training data selection.

We hope the program has been both educational and rewarding for them, offering opportunities to tackle real-world societal challenges while acquiring new skills and knowledge beyond the scope of their degrees.