Professor Heidi Christensen

PhD

Department of Computer Science

Head of Department

Professor of Spoken Language Technology

Member of the Speech and Hearing (SpandH) research group

heidi.christensen@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 1950

Regent Court (DCS)

Full contact details

Professor Heidi Christensen
Department of Computer Science
Regent Court (DCS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP

Profile

Professor Christensen obtained her M.Sc. and a Ph.D. degrees from Aalborg University, Denmark, in 1996 and 2002, respectively. In 1998, she was a visiting researcher at IDIAP, Switzerland. From 2000, she worked as a research associate on numerous national and international projects in the Speech and Hearing group in Sheffield before taking up her lectureship in 2015. She was subsequently appointed a senior lecturer (2019) and chair (2022) in the department.

She has a long-term interest in EDI and served as the Faculty Director of EDI (2020-2022) and as the current Deputy Head of Department oversees the One University pillar of work which includes EDI, Wellbeing, Sustainability, Philanthropy and Collaborative Culture.

Her main research interests are in the areas of recognition of disordered speech, automatic processing of conversations, and the automatic detection and tracking of paralinguistic information such as emotions and general interactional behaviours.

Research interests: Her research interests are in the use of speech and language processing in the healthcare domain. She has considerable experience in the areas of recognition of disordered speech, automatic processing of conversations and the automatic detection and tracking of paralinguistic information such as emotions and general interactional behaviours. Her research has been supported by EU, UKRI, NIHR, Google and various charities like Rosetrees Trust and the Psychiatry Research Trust. She has considerable experience in leading highly interdisciplinary research projects including being the technical lead in the development of the CognoSpeak system for using AI to detect early signs of dementia.

Publications

Journal articles

Walker G, Pevy N, O'Malley R, Mirheidari B, Reuber M, Christensen H & Blackburn D (2023) Speech patterns in responses to questions asked by an intelligent virtual agent can help to distinguish between people with early stage neurodegenerative disorders and healthy controls. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. View this article in WRRO
Pevy N, Christensen H, Walker T & Reuber M (2023) Differentiating between epileptic and functional/dissociative seizures using semantic content analysis of transcripts of routine clinic consultations. Epilepsy & Behavior, 143, 109217-109217.
Attas D, Power N, Smithies J, Bee C, Aadahl V, Kellett S, Blackmore C & Christensen H (2022) Automated detection of the competency of delivering guided self-help for anxiety via speech and language processing. Applied Sciences, 12(17).
Børty L, Brøndum RF, Christensen HS, Vesteghem C, Severinsen M, Johnsen SP, Ehlers LH, Falkmer U, Poulsen LØ & Bøgsted M (2022) Trends and drivers of pharmaceutical expenditures from systemic anti-cancer therapy.. Eur J Health Econ.
Bell S, Harkness K, Roman M, Gardner J, Richards E, Howe J, Sikaonga M, Mirheidari B, Christensen H & Blackburn D (2022) 050 Feasibility of an automated assessment to measure cognition and mood in the acute stroke setting. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 93(9), e2.246-e2.246.
Sproson L, Mills N, Pryde L, Adebajo A, Coyle D, Preston J, Blackburn D, Christensen H & Lanfranchi V (2022) Keeping patient and public partnership at the heart of medical technology development during Covid-19 : examples of adaptive practice. Journal of Medical Engineering & Technology. View this article in WRRO
Yue Z, Loweimi E, Christensen H, Barker J & Cvetkovic Z (2022) Acoustic Modelling From Raw Source and Filter Components for Dysarthric Speech Recognition. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 30, 2968-2980.
Brewer E, Mirheidari B, O'Malley R, Reuber M, Christensen H & Blackburn DJ (2021) Characterising spoken interactions of healthy ageing adults with CognoSpeak, a web‐based cognitive assessment tool. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 17(S5).
Pevy N, Christensen H, Walker T & Reuber M (2021) #3079 Investigating the feasibility of automating the differential diagnosis of transient loss of consciousness. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 92(8), A7.1-A7.
Beavis L, O'Malley R, Mirheidari B, Christensen H & Blackburn D (2021) How can automated linguistic analysis help to discern functional cognitive disorder from healthy controls and mild cognitive impairment?. BJPsych open, 7(Suppl 1), S7-S7.
Pevy N, Christensen H, Walker T & Reuber M (2021) Feasibility of using an automated analysis of formulation effort in patients’ spoken seizure descriptions in the differential diagnosis of epileptic and nonepileptic seizures. Seizure, 91, 141-145.
Alhinti L, Christensen H & Cunningham S (2021) Acoustic differences in emotional speech of people with dysarthria. Speech Communication, 126, 44-60. View this article in WRRO
O'Malley R, Walker T, Mirheidari B, Christensen H, Reuber M, Blackburn DJ & Venneri A (2020) A fully automated cognitive screening tool based on assessment of speech and language. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 16(S6).
O’Malley R, Morris L-A, Longden C, Turner A, Walker T, Venneri A, Mirheidari B, Christensen H, Reuber M & Blackburn D (2020) 26 Can an automated assessment of language help distinguish between Functional Cognitive Disorder and early neurodegeneration?. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 91(8), e18.2-e19.
Walker G, Morris L-A, Christensen H, Mirheidari B, Reuber M & Blackburn DJ (2020) Characterising spoken responses to an intelligent virtual agent by persons with mild cognitive impairment. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. View this article in WRRO
Mirheidari B, Pan Y, Blackburn D, O'Malley R, Walker T, Venneri A, Reuber M & Christensen H (2020) Data augmentation using generative networks to identify dementia.. CoRR, abs/2004.05989. View this article in WRRO
O’Malley R, Mirhedari B, Harkness K, Reuber M, Venneri A, Christensen H & Blackburn D (2019) 055 The digital doctor : a fully automated stratification and monitoring system for patients with memory complaints. Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 90(12). View this article in WRRO
O’Malley R, Brook E, Lewis A, Sonksen I, Mirhedari B, Venneri A, Christensen H & Blackburn D (2019) 056 Exploring the feasibility of automating verbal fluency tasks for cognitive assessment: data collection and analysis. Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 90(12). View this article in WRRO
Easton K, Potter S, Bec R, Bennion M, Christensen H, Grindell C, Mirheidari B, Weich S, de Witte L, Wolstenholme D & Hawley M (2019) A virtual agent to support individuals living with physical and mental comorbidities : co-design and acceptability testing. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(5). View this article in WRRO
Al-Hameed S, Benaissa M, Christensen H, Mirheidari B, Blackburn D & Reuber M (2019) A new diagnostic approach for the identification of patients with neurodegenerative cognitive complaints. PLoS ONE, 14(5). View this article in WRRO
Mirheidari B, Blackburn D, Walker T, Reuber M & Christensen H (2019) Dementia detection using automatic analysis of conversations. Computer Speech and Language, 53, 65-79. View this article in WRRO
Walker T, Christensen H, Mirheidari B, Swainston T, Rutten C, Mayer I, Blackburn D & Reuber M (2018) Developing an intelligent virtual agent to stratify people with cognitive complaints: A comparison of human-patient and intelligent virtual agent-patient interaction.. Dementia. View this article in WRRO
Orozco-Arroyave JR, Vásquez-Correa JC, Vargas-Bonilla JF, Arora R, Dehak N, Nidadavolu PS, Christensen H, Rudzicz F, Yancheva M, Chinaei H , Vann A et al (2018) NeuroSpeech. SoftwareX, 8, 69-70. View this article in WRRO
Orozco-Arroyave JR, Vásquez-Correa JC, Vargas-Bonilla JF, Arora R, Dehak N, Nidadavolu PS, Christensen H, Rudzicz F, Yancheva M, Chinaei H , Vann A et al (2018) NeuroSpeech: An open-source software for Parkinson's speech analysis. Digital Signal Processing: A Review Journal, 77, 207-221. View this article in WRRO
Blackburn D, Mirheidari BM, Rutten C, Mayer I, Walker T, Christensen H & Rueber M (2017) PO029 An avatar aid in memory clinic. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 88(Suppl 1), A19.4-A20.
Cernak M, Orozco-Arroyave JR, Rudzicz F, Christensen H, Vásquez-Correa JC & Nöth E (2017) Characterisation of voice quality of Parkinson’s disease using differential phonological posterior features. Computer Speech & Language, 46, 196-208. View this article in WRRO
Malavasi M, Turri E, Atria JJ, Christensen H, Marxer R, Desideri L, Coy A, Tamburini F & Green P (2017) An Innovative Speech-Based User Interface for Smarthomes and IoT Solutions to Help People with Speech and Motor Disabilities. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 242, 306-313. View this article in WRRO
Mirheidari B, Blackburn D, Harkness K, Walker T, Venneri A, Reuber M & Christensen H (2017) Toward the Automation of Diagnostic Conversation Analysis in Patients with Memory Complaints. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 58(2), 373-387. View this article in WRRO
F Rudzicz JA (2015) Perspective on Speech and Language Interaction for Daily Assistive Technology: Introduction to Part 2 – Speaking and Reading Aids. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), 6.
F O Portet JA (2015) Perspective on Speech and Language Interacton for Daily Assistive Technlogy: Introduction to the Special Issue Part 3. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), 7.
H Christensen FP & Alexandersson J (2015) Perspective on Speech and Language Interaction for Daily Assistive Technology: Introduction to Part 1 of the Special Issue. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), 6.
Ma N, Barker J, Christensen H & Green P (2012) A hearing-inspired approach for distant-microphone speech recognition in the presence of multiple sources. Computer Speech and Language.
Barker J, Vincent E, Ma N, Christensen H & Green P (2012) The PASCAL CHiME speech separation and recognition challenge. Computer Speech and Language.
Ma N, Barker J, Christensen H & Green P (2012) Combining speech fragment decoding and adaptive noise floor modeling. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 20(3), 818-827.
Christensen H, Ma N, Wrigley SN & Barker J (2008) Improving source localisation in multi-source, reverberant conditions: exploiting local spectro-temporal location cues.. Abstract for Acoust. Soc. Am. mtg.
Christensen H, Gotoh Y & Renals S (2008) A cascaded broadcast news highlighter. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 16(1), 151-161.
Alhinti L, Cunningham S & Christensen H () The Dysarthric Expressed Emotional Database (DEED): An audio-visual database in British English. PLOS ONE, 18(8), e0287971-e0287971.
Hernáez-Rioja I, Gonzalez-Lopez JA & Christensen H () Special Issue on Applications of Speech and Language Technologies in Healthcare. Applied Sciences, 13(11), 6840-6840.
Walker G, Walker T, O'Malley R, Mirheidari B, Christensen H, Reuber M & Blackburn D () Features of answers to questions about recent events by people with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's disease, and healthy controls. Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders.
Mouritzen MT, Carus A, Ladekarl M, Meldgaard P, Nielsen AWM, Livbjerg A, Larsen JW, Skuladottir H, Kristiansen C, Wedervang K , Schytte T et al () Nationwide Survival Benefit after Implementation of First-Line Immunotherapy for Patients with Advanced NSCLC—Real World Efficacy. Cancers, 13(19), 4846-4846.
Martínez D, LLeida E, Green P, Christensen H, Ortega A & Miguel A () Intelligibility assessment and speech recogniser word accuracy rate prediction for dysarthric speakers in a factor analysis subspace. Submitted to ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS).

Conference proceedings papers

Ellis S, Goetze S & Christensen H (2023) Moving Towards Non-Binary Gender Identification Via Analysis of System Errors in Binary Gender Classification. ICASSP 2023 - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 4 June 2023 - 10 June 2023.
Alzahrani F, Mirheidari B, Blackburn D, Maddock S & Christensen H (2023) Investigating Visual Features for Cognitive Impairment Detection Using In-the-wild Data. 2023 IEEE 17th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), 5 January 2023 - 8 January 2023.
Yue Z, Loweimi E, Cvetkovic Z, Christensen H & Barker J (2022) Multi-Modal Acoustic-Articulatory Feature Fusion For Dysarthric Speech Recognition. ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 23 May 2022 - 27 May 2022.
Pevy N, Walker T, Christensen H & Reuber M (2022) Exploring the feasibility of an interactive virtual avatar and automated conversation analysis in the differentiation of epileptic and dissociative seizures. EPILEPSIA, Vol. 63 (pp 271-271)
Alzahrani F, Mirheidari B, Blackburn D, Maddock S & Christensen H (2021) Eye Blink Rate Based Detection of Cognitive Impairment Using In-the-wild Data. 2021 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 28 September 2021 - 1 October 2021.
Pan Y, Nallanthighal VS, Blackburn D, Christensen H & Harma A (2021) Multi-Task Estimation of Age and Cognitive Decline from Speech. ICASSP 2021 - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 6 June 2021 - 11 June 2021.
Beavis L, O'Malley R, Mirheidari B, Christensen H & Blackburn D (2021) How can automated linguistic analysis help to discern functional cognitive disorder from healthy controls and mild cognitive impairment?. BJPsych Open, Vol. 7(S1) (pp S7-S7). Virtual, 21 June 2021 - 24 June 2021.
Attas D, Mirheidari B, Blackburn D, Venneri A, Walker T, Harkness K, Reuber M, Blackmore C & Christensen H (2021) Predicting Levels of Depression and Anxiety in People with Neurodegenerative Memory Complaints Presenting with Confounding Symptoms. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, Vol. 285 (pp 58-69)
Pevy N, Christensen H, Walker T & Reuber M (2021) Investigating the feasibility of automating the differential diagnosis of Transient Loss of Consciousness. EPILEPSIA, Vol. 62 (pp 354-355)
Cummins N, Pan Y, Ren Z, Fritsch J, Nallanthighal VS, Christensen H, Blackburn D, Schuller BW, Magimai-Doss M, Strik H & Härmä A (2020) A comparison of acoustic and linguistics methodologies for Alzheimer’s dementia recognition. Interspeech 2020 (pp 2182-2186). Shanghai, China, 25 October 2020 - 29 October 2020.
Alhinti L, Cunningham S & Christensen H (2020) Recognising emotions in dysarthric speech using typical speech data. Interspeech 2020 (pp 4821-4825). Shanghai, China, 25 October 2020 - 29 October 2020.
Pan Y, Mirheidari B, Reuber M, Venneri A, Blackburn D & Christensen H (2020) Improving Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease Using Automatic Speech Recognition to Identify High-Quality Segments for More Robust Feature Extraction. Interspeech 2020
Mirheidari B, Blackburn D, O’Malley R, Venneri A, Walker T, Reuber M & Christensen H (2020) Improving Cognitive Impairment Classification by Generative Neural Network-Based Feature Augmentation. Interspeech 2020, 25 October 2020 - 25 October 2020.
Xiong F, Barker J & Christensen H (2020) Deep learning of articulatory-based representations and applications for improving dysarthric speech recognition. Speech Communication - 13th ITG-Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation (pp 331-335)
Xiong F, Barker J, Yue Z & Christensen H (2020) Source Domain Data Selection for Improved Transfer Learning Targeting Dysarthric Speech Recognition. ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 4 May 2020 - 8 May 2020. View this article in WRRO
Yue Z, Xiong F, Christensen H & Barker J (2020) Exploring Appropriate Acoustic and Language Modelling Choices for Continuous Dysarthric Speech Recognition. ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 4 May 2020 - 8 May 2020. View this article in WRRO
Pan Y, Mirheidari B, Reuber M, Venneri A, Blackburn D & Christensen H (2019) Automatic Hierarchical Attention Neural Network for Detecting AD. Interspeech 2019, 15 September 2019 - 15 September 2019.
Xiong F, Barker J & Christensen H (2019) Phonetic Analysis of Dysarthric Speech Tempo and Applications to Robust Personalised Dysarthric Speech Recognition. ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 12 May 2019 - 17 May 2019.
Mirheidari B, Blackburn D, OrMalley R, Walker T, Venneri A, Reuber M & Christensen H (2019) Computational Cognitive Assessment: Investigating the Use of an Intelligent Virtual Agent for the Detection of Early Signs of Dementia. ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 12 May 2019 - 17 May 2019.
AlSaleh MMS, Moore R, Christensen H & Arvaneh M (2019) Examining Temporal Variations in Recognizing Unspoken Words using EEG Signals. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 7 October 2018 - 10 October 2018. View this article in WRRO
AlSaleh M, Moore R, Christensen H & Arvaneh M (2018) Discriminating between Imagined Speech and Non-Speech Tasks using EEG. 2018 40th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) (pp 1952-1955), 18 July 2018 - 21 July 2018. View this article in WRRO
Mirheidari B, Blackburn D, Walker T, Venneri A, Reuber M & Christensen H (2018) Detecting Signs of Dementia Using Word Vector Representations. Interspeech 2018
Coy A, Green P, Cunningham S, Christensen H, Atria JJ, Rudzicz F, Malavasi M & Desideri L (2018) Embedding speech technology into intelligent tutoring systems using the CloudCAST speech technology platform. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 10858 LNCS (pp 421-424)
Al-Hameed S, Benaissa M & Christensen H (2017) Detecting and Predicting Alzheimer's Disease Severity in Longitudinal Acoustic Data. Proceedings of the International Conference on Bioinformatics Research and Applications 2017 - ICBRA 2017, 8 December 2017 - 10 December 2017.
Blackburn D, Reuber M, Christensen H, Mayer I, Rutten C, Venneri A, chirs E & Mirheidari B (2017) An avatar to screen for cognitive impairment. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, Vol. 381 (pp 319-319)
Mirheidari B, Blackburn DJ, Harkness K, Walker T, Venneri A, Reuber M & Christensen H (2017) An Avatar-based system for identifying individuals likely to develop dementia. Interspeech 2017 (pp 3147-3151) View this article in WRRO
Cernak M, Nöth E, Rudzicz F, Christensen H, Orozco-Arroyave JR, Arora R, Bocklet T, Chinaei H, Hannink J, Nidadavolu PS , Vasquez JC et al (2017) On the impact of non-modal phonation on phonological features. ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings (pp 5090-5094) View this article in WRRO
Vasquez-Correa JC, Orozco-Arroyave JR, Arora R, Noth E, Dehak N, Christensen H, Rudzicz F, Bocklet T, Cernak M, Chinaei H , Hannink J et al (2017) Multi-view representation learning via gcca for multimodal analysis of Parkinson's disease. ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings (pp 2966-2970) View this article in WRRO
Cunningham S, Green P, Christensen H, Atria JJ, Coy A, Malavasi M, Desideri L & Rudzicz F (2017) Cloud-Based Speech Technology for Assistive Technology Applications (CloudCAST). Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, Vol. 242 (pp 322-329) View this article in WRRO
Malavasi M, Turri E, Motolese MR, Marxer R, Farwer J, Christensen H, Desideri L, Tamburini F & Green P (2017) An Innovative Speech-Based Interface to Control AAL and IoT Solutions to Help People with Speech and Motor Disability (pp 269-278)
AlSaleh MM, Arvaneh M, Christensen H & Moore RK (2016) Brain-computer interface technology for speech recognition: A review. 2016 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA), 13 December 2016 - 16 December 2016.
Mirheidari B, Blackburn D, Reuber M, Walker T & Christensen H (2016) Diagnosing people with dementia using automatic conversation analysis. Proceedings of Interspeech 2016 (pp 1220-1224) View this article in WRRO
Nicolao M, Christensen H, Cunningham S, Green P & Hain T (2016) A framework for collecting realistic recordings of dysarthric speech - The homeService corpus. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016 (pp 1993-1997) View this article in WRRO
Al-Hameed S, Benaissa M & Christensen H (2016) Simple and robust audio-based detection of biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease. SLPAT 2016 Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies
Casanueva I, Hain T, Christensen H, Marxer R & Green P (2015) Knowledge transfer between speakers for personalised dialogue management. Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, September 2015 - September 2015.
Green P, Marxer R, Cunningham S, Christensen H, Rudzicz F, Yancheva M, Coy A, Malavasi M & Desideri L (2015) Remote Speech Technology for Speech Professionals - the CloudCAST initiative. Proceedings of SLPAT 2015: 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies, September 2015 - September 2015.
Christensen H, Nicolao M, Cunningham S, Green P, Deena S & Hain T (2015) Speech-enabled environmental control in an AAL setting for people with speech disorders: a case study. IET International Conference on Technologies for Active and Assisted Living (TechAAL)
Alexandersson J, Altinsoy E, Christensen H, Ljunglof P, Portet F & Rudzicz F (2015) Introduction. SLPAT 2015 - 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies, Proceedings (pp III)
Christensen H, Casanueva I, Cunningham S, Green P & Hain T (2014) Automatic selection of speakers for improved acoustic modelling: recognition of disordered speech with sparse data. 2014 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), 7 December 2014 - 10 December 2014.
Casanueva I, Christensen H, Hain T & Green P (2014) Adaptive speech recognition and dialogue management for users with speech disorders. Proceedings of Interspeech’14
Christensen H, Green P & Hain T (2013) Learning speaker-specific pronunciations of disordered speech. 14TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION (INTERSPEECH 2013), VOLS 1-5 (pp 1158-1162)
Christensen H, Aniol MB, Bell P, Green P, Hain T, King S & Swietojanski P (2013) Combining in-domain and out-of-domain speech data for automatic recognition of disordered speech. 14TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION (INTERSPEECH 2013), VOLS 1-5 (pp 3609-3612)
Martinez D, Green P & Christensen H (2013) Dysarthria Intelligibility Assessment in a Factor Analysis Total Variability Space. 14TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION (INTERSPEECH 2013), VOLS 1-5 (pp 2132-2136)
González DM, Green P & Christensen H (2013) Dysarthria Intelligibility Assessment in a Factor Analysis Total Variability Space. Interspeech’13
Christensen H, Cunningham S, Green P & Hain T (2013) homeService: Voice-enabled assistive technology in the home using cloud-based automatic speech recognition. 4th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT)
Christensen H, Green P & Hain T (2013) Learning speaker-specific pronunciations of disordered speech. Interspeech’13
Christensen H, Aniol MB, Bell P, Green P, Hain T, King S & Swietojanski P (2013) Combining in-domain and out-of-domain speech data for automatic recognition of disordered speech. Interspeech’13
Fox C, Christensen H & Hain T (2012) Studio report: Linux audio for multi-speaker natural speech technology.. Proc. Linux Audio Conference
Christensen H, Siddharth S, Neill PO, Clarke Z, Judge S, Cunningham S & Hawley M (2012) SPECS - an embedded platform, speech-driven environmental control system evaluated in a virtuous circle framework. In proc. Workshop on Innovation and Applications in Speech Technology
Christensen H, Cunningham S, Fox C, Green P & Hain T (2012) A comparative study of adaptive, automatic recognition of disordered speech. 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association 2012, INTERSPEECH 2012, Vol. 2 (pp 1774-1777)
Ma N, Barker J, Christensen H & Green P (2011) Recent advances in fragment-based speech recognition in reverberant multisource environments.. Proceedings of ISCA Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (pp 68-73)
Ma N, Barker J, Christensen H & Green P (2011) Binaural cues for fragment-based speech recognition in reverberant multisource environments. Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2011 (pp 1657-1660)
Ma N, Barker J, Christensen H & Green P (2011) Incorporating localisation cues in a fragment decoding framework for distant binaural speech recognition.. IEEE Joint Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA’11) (pp 207-212)
Ma N, Barker J, Christensen H & Green P (2011) Binaural cues for fragment-based speech recognition in reverberant multisource environments. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH (pp 1657-1660)
Ma N, Barker J, Christensen H & Green P (2010) Distant microphone speech recognition in a noisy indoor environment: combining soft missing data and speech fragment decoding.. ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Statistical And Perceptual Audition
Christensen H & Barker J (2010) Speaker turn tracking with mobile microphones: Combining location and pitch information. European Signal Processing Conference (pp 954-958)
Christensen H, Barker J, Ma N & Green P (2010) The CHiME corpus: A resource and a challenge for computational hearing in multisource environments. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2010 (pp 1918-1921)
Christensen H & Barker J (2009) Using location cues to track speaker changes from mobile, binaural microphones. INTERSPEECH 2009: 10TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION 2009, VOLS 1-5 (pp 124-127)
Christensen H, Ma N, Wrigley SN & Barker J (2009) A speech fragment approach to localising multiple speakers in reverberant environments. ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings (pp 4593-4596)
Arnaud E, Christensen H, Lu Y-C, Barker J, Khalidov V, Hansard ME, Holveck B, Mathieu H, Narasimha R, Taillant E , Forbes F et al (2008) The CAVA corpus: synchronised stereoscopic and binaural datasets with head movements.. ICMI (pp 109-116)
Christensen H, Ma N, Wrigley SN & Barker J (2007) Integrating pitch and localisation cues at a speech fragment level. International Speech Communication Association - 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech 2007, Vol. 4 (pp 2752-2755)
Lu YC, Cooke M & Christensen H (2007) Active binaural distance estimation for dynamic sources. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH, Vol. 2 (pp 933-936)
Christensen H, Kolluru BK, Gotoh Y & Renals S (2005) Maximum entropy segmentation of broadcast news. 2005 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOLS 1-5 (pp 1029-1032)
Kolluru BK, Christensen H & Gotoh Y (2005) Multi-stage compaction approach to broadcast news summarisation. 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (pp 69-72)
Christensen H, Lindberg B & Andersen O (2005) INTRODUCING PHONETICALLY MOTIVATED, HETEROGENEOUS INFORMATION INTO AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION. INTEGRATION OF PHONETIC KNOWLEDGE IN SPEECH TECHNOLOGY, Vol. 25 (pp 67-86)
Christensen H, Kolluru B, Gotoh Y & Renais S (2004) From text summarisation to style-specific summarisation for broadcast news. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 2997 (pp 223-237)
Christensen H, Gotoh Y, Kolluru B & Renals S (2003) Are extractive text summarisation techniques portable to broadcast news?. ASRU'03: 2003 IEEE WORKSHOP ON AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION AND UNDERSTANDING ASRU '03 (pp 489-494)
Kolluru B, Christensen H, Gotoh Y & Renals S (2003) Exploring the style-technique interaction in extractive summarization of broadcast news. ASRU'03: 2003 IEEE WORKSHOP ON AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION AND UNDERSTANDING ASRU '03 (pp 495-500)
Christensen H, Gotoh Y & Renals S (2001) Punctuation Annotation Using Statistical Prosody Models. Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding (pp 35-40)
Christensen H, Lindberg B & Andersen O (2001) Introducing Phonetically Motivated Information into ASR. Proceedings of Eurospeech 2001
Christensen H, Lindberg B & Andersen O (2000) Employing Heterogeneous Information in a Multi-Stream Framework. Proceedings of ICASSP 2000
Christensen H, Lindberg B & Andersen O (2000) Noise robustness of heterogeneous features employing minimum classification error feature space transformations.. INTERSPEECH (pp 534-537)
Hollands S, Blackburn D & Christensen H () Evaluating the Performance of State-of-the-Art ASR Systems on Non-Native English using Corpora with Extensive Language Background Variation. Interspeech 2022
Mirheidari B, Bittar A, Cummins N, Downs J, Fisher HL & Christensen H () Automatic Detection of Expressed Emotion from Five-Minute Speech Samples: Challenges and Opportunities. Interspeech 2022
Mirheidari B, Blackburn D & Christensen H () Automatic cognitive assessment: Combining sparse datasets with disparate cognitive scores. Interspeech 2022
Yue Z, Loweimi E, Christensen H, Barker J & Cvetkovic Z () Dysarthric Speech Recognition From Raw Waveform with Parametric CNNs. Interspeech 2022
Pan Y, Mirheidari B, Harris JM, Thompson JC, Jones M, Snowden JS, Blackburn D & Christensen H () Using the Outputs of Different Automatic Speech Recognition Paradigms for Acoustic- and BERT-Based Alzheimer’s Dementia Detection Through Spontaneous Speech. Interspeech 2021
Mirheidari B, Pan Y, Blackburn D, O’Malley R & Christensen H () Identifying Cognitive Impairment Using Sentence Representation Vectors. Interspeech 2021
Yue Z, Barker J, Christensen H, McKean C, Ashton E, Wren Y, Gadgil S & Bright R () Parental Spoken Scaffolding and Narrative Skills in Crowd-Sourced Storytelling Samples of Young Children. Interspeech 2021
O'Malley RPD, Mirheidari B, Harkness K, Reuber M, Venneri A, Walker T, Christensen H & Blackburn D () Fully automated cognitive screening tool based on assessment of speech and language. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry
Pan Y, Mirheidari B, Tu Z, O’Malley R, Walker T, Venneri A, Reuber M, Blackburn D & Christensen H () Acoustic Feature Extraction with Interpretable Deep Neural Network for Neurodegenerative Related Disorder Classification. Interspeech 2020
Green P, Marxer R, Cunningham S, Christensen H, Rudzicz F, Yancheva M, Coy A, Malavasi M, Desideri L & Tamburini F () CloudCAST — Remote Speech Technology for Speech Professionals. Interspeech 2016
Christensen H, Ma N, Wrigley SN & Barker J () Integrating pitch and localisation cues at a speech fragment level. Interspeech 2007
Yue Z, Christensen H & Barker J () Autoencoder bottleneck features with multi-task optimisation for improved continuous dysarthric speech recognition. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH View this article in WRRO
Alhinti L, Christensen H & Cunningham S () Towards the Understanding of Communicating Emotions for People with Dysarthria. Workshop in Speech and Hearing Disorders (WSPD 2018)

Reports

Christensen H & Barker J (2008) Inferring perceiver actions from binaural data
Khalidov V, Lu Y-C, Holveck B, Taillant E, Arnaud E, Barker J, Christensen H & Mathieu H (2007) Synchronized stereoscopic and binaural dataset with head movements : Recording details

Theses / Dissertations

Christensen H (2002) Speech Recognition using Heterogenous Information Extraction in Multi-Stream Based Systems.
Christensen H (1996) Speaker Adaptation of Hidden Markov Models using Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression.

Working papers

Pan Y, Mirheidari B, Reuber M, Venneri A, Blackburn D & Christensen H (2019) Automatic Hierarchical Attention Neural Network for Detecting AD.

Datasets

Nicolao M, Hain T, Christensen H, Green P & Cunningham S The homeService corpus v1.0.

Other

Christensen H & Barker J (2009) Simultaneous Tracking of Perceiver Movements and Speaker Changes Using Head-Centered, Binaural Data.
Christensen H, Barker J, Lu Y-C, Xavier J, Caseiro R & Araújo H (2009) POPeye: Real-time, binaural sound source localisation on an audio-visual robot-head.

Preprints

Mirheidari B, Bittar A, Cummins N, Downs J, Fisher HL & Christensen H (2022) Automatic Detection of Expressed Emotion from Five-Minute Speech Samples: Challenges and Opportunities, arXiv.
Mirheidari B, Pan Y, Blackburn D, O'Malley R, Walker T, Venneri A, Reuber M & Christensen H (2020) Data augmentation using generative networks to identify dementia, arXiv.
Mirheidari B, Pan Y, Walker T, Reuber M, Venneri A, Blackburn D & Christensen H (2019) Detecting Alzheimer's Disease by estimating attention and elicitation path through the alignment of spoken picture descriptions with the picture prompt, arXiv.
Mirheidari B, Pan Y, Walker T, Reuber M, Venneri A, Blackburn D & Christensen H (2019) Detecting Alzheimer's Disease by estimating attention and elicitation path through the alignment of spoken picture descriptions with the picture prompt.. View this article in WRRO
Easton K, Potter S, Bec R, Bennion M, Christensen H, Grindell C, Mirheidari B, Weich S, de Witte L, Wolstenholme D & Hawley MS () A Virtual Agent to Support Individuals Living With Physical and Mental Comorbidities: Co-Design and Acceptability Testing (Preprint).

Grants

Current Grants

CognoSpeak-eQMS, EPSRC, 01/01/2023 - 31/12/2023, £22,904, as PI
The automated coding of expressed emotion to enhance clinical and epidemiological mental health research in adolescence, MRC, 11/2022 - 10/2024, £379,598, as Co-PI
CcHAT: CognoSpeak: a Cognitive Health Assessment Tool, NIHR, 02/2022 - 01/2025, £1,357,247, as Co-I
Interdisciplinary project on COMPutational Assessment of Stroke Survivors (COMPASS), Rosetrees Trust, 02/2020 - 02/2024, £124,864, as PI
UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Speech and Language Technologies and their Applications, EPSRC, 04/2019 - 09/2027, £5,508,850, as Co-PI
Deep learning of articulatory-based representations of dysarthric speech, Google, 02/2016 - 12/2024, £46,624, as PI

Previous Grants

Participatory co-design of a platform for collecting atypical speech data, Research England, 03/2022 - 07/2022, £19,692, as Co-PI
CognoSpeak UX, Research England, 06/2021 - 02/2022, £27,694, as PI
COMPASS: COMPutational Assessment of Stroke Survivors, Research England, 11/2019 - 06/2020, £48,886, as PI
COCOA: COmputerised COgnitive Assessment, MRC, 10/2018 to 09/2019, £49,513, as PI
TAPAS: Training Network on Automatic Processing of PAthological Speech, EU H2020, 11/2017 - 09/2022, £468,000, as PI
CloudVent: Cloud-based speech recognition for people with paralysis using ventilators, RCUK, 10/2015 - 04/2016, £360,000, as Co-PI

Professional activities and memberships

Member of the Speech and Hearing research group
Member of the ISCA Diversity Committee
Co-organiser of ASRU 2021
Co-organiser of Interspeech 2023