Ioanna Karagianni

Leap of faith in tech, combining my great interest for technology and my love for language.

Courses of interest: Information Retrieval and Text Mining • Deep Learning for Speech and Language Processing • Advanced Speech Perception • Text Technology (HTML, XML, SQL, Relational Databases) • Computational Linguistics Team Laboratory (Text Emotion Detection) • Ethics and NLP • Interpretability and Analysis of NLP Models • Multilingual Speech Processing (Multilingual TTS) • Current Topics in Speech Processing (Immersive TTS) • Bayesian Statistics • Foundational Questions regarding LLMs • AI Prototyping, Technology Entrepreneurship, Project Management

6 - month R&D Project under Dr. Vu, Thang: Fine-Grained Controllable LLM based Speech Synthesis via Instruction Tuning.

Aim of the project: To investigate if fine grained controllability in LLM-based TTS systems is possible. We did so by combining CosyVoice2 with the ParaCLAP framework. The goal was to control speech characteristics such as pitch, duration, intensity, jitter, and shimmer using natural language instructions at both utterance and word level. Our approach leveraged acoustic feature extraction and instruction tuning to enable more expressive and controllable speech synthesis.

Thesis: Beyond EER: Speaker-Level Evaluation and Performance Assessment of Voice Anonymization with Alternative Metrics and Phonetic Features Analysis.

Thesis Scope: Examination of alternative evaluation metrics for assessing privacy in voice anonymization systems in order to overcome the shortcommings of EER. The aims to provide a deeper understanding of how these metrics capture privacy preservation compared to the traditional EER used in the VPC 2024. Moreover, an effort is made to investigate the meta-level, primarily the phonetic but also the potential linguistic factors at the speaker level that may affect the effectiveness of anonymization, either positively or negatively.

GPA: 8.32/10 (top 10% of the department)

Courses of interest: Introduction to Linguistics • Historical Linguistics, Introduction to IE Linguistics • Phonetics- Phonology (lab) • Morphology • Syntax I • Semantics • Pragmatics •Historical Grammar of Ancient Greek (Phonetics-Phonology) • Psycholinguistics- Neurolinguistics • Language Acquisition • Computational Linguistics • Second Language Acquisition - Teaching Greek as a Foreign Language • History of Linguistics • Text Linguistics- Discourse Analysis • Experimental Linguistics • Sociolinguistics

Thesis: The Argument Structure production in the narrative speech of native Greek patients with Broca’s and Anomic Aphasia in association with Athena Research Centre

Societies: Lost Student´s Society - Lingustics Journal Club, Accessibility Unit.

One of the 30 finalists selected from 500 applicants to participate in the intensive bootcamp by WE LEAD, in collaboration with Code.Hub.

Topics Covered: Database Management, Data Visualisation, ML Libraries, Soft skills sessions offered by Morphoses on Critical Thinking, Teamwork and Negotiation.

Final Group Project: Predicting the City-Cycle fuel consumption in miles per gallon of a car - A Classification Problem, where I implemented a NN model using torch that achieved an F1 score of 0.98.