Research Associate in Spoken Language Processing
Academic Division: Information Engineering
Research group: Machine Intelligence
Telephone: +44 1223 7 65152
Email: sb2549@cam.ac.uk
Research interests
I am a Research Associate at Cambridge University’s Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) and the Machine Intelligence Lab (Department of Engineering), where I work on the intersection of AI, speech, and natural language processing for education.
I completed my PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Trento and Fondazione Bruno Kessler, focusing on the automatic assessment of L2 spoken English. My current research mostly focuses on learner-oriented feedback, fine-grained assessment of language proficiency, and spoken grammatical error correction.
I have presented my work at leading international conferences, including Interspeech, ICASSP, SLT, SLaTE, BEA, COLING, and LREC. In 2023, my co-authors and I received the SLaTE Best Paper Award, and in 2024 my PhD thesis was a finalist for the Jacqueline Ross TOEFL Dissertation Award.
Alongside my research, I currently serve as President of the College Research Associates at Emmanuel College.
Outside academia, I have worked as a musician - releasing three solo albums, collaborating with Italian artists, and performing at Festival di Sanremo 2011 - as well as a secondary school teacher.
Department role and responsibilities