Willemijn Heeren's Homepage

Contact:
dr. Willemijn Heeren
Human Media Interaction - CHoral project
Universiteit Twente &
Gemeentearchief Rotterdam
w.f.l.heeren@ewi.utwente.nl
wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~heerenwfl/


Research

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Current projects

CHoral - Access to oral history


Supervision: prof. dr. Franciska de Jong, dr. Roeland Ordelman
Project team: Willemijn Heeren, Laurens van der Werff, Thijs Verschoor
CHoral is a joint initiative of the Municipal Archives Rotterdam (Gemeentearchief) and HMI, with participation from Radio Rijnmond and Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam.

CHoral aims at the development of spoken document retrieval technology for the disclosure of oral history collections. With speech recognition transcriptions can be generated for spoken documents (audio and video). The transcripts have timestamps associated with the words and will be used to build an index that allows searching the audio files at fragment level. This project aims to contribute to the advent of a methodological framework for handling and use of multimedia oral history content for historical research.

Take a look at our first demo (in Dutch). It was developed in cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

A second CHoral demonstrator was developed in cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, the UT Databases group, and DNB Media.

CHoral contributed to the interview access functionality of the Rotterdam 'Brandgrens' Website.




Leiden University: Dual-Pro

As of September 1st 2008 I am also working for Leiden University on the FP-7 SME project DUAL-PRO: Dual electric-acoustic speech processor with linguistic assessment tools for deaf individuals with residual low frequency hearing. I am involved in the development of a prosodic test battery.


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Earlier projects

PhD project: The acquisition of phoneme contrasts in L1 and L2
Supervisors: Prof. dr. S.G. Nooteboom, Dr. M.E.H. Schouten

This study will examine how the perception of new phoneme contrasts develops. In classification training, new L2 contrasts will be taught to children aged 12 and adults. There are two hypotheses on the development of phoneme categories. The first hypothesis, acquired distinctiveness, states that no distinctions between adjacent stimuli from a phoneme continuum can be heard before training. During training, perceptual sensitivity increases for stimuli that are categorized differently. This learning strategy is expected for adults. The second hypothesis, acquired similarity, states that all stimuli can be distinguished before training. Training causes a decrease in sensitivity for items that are categorized together. Infants are thought to show acquired similarity. The way in which children learn new contrasts, as they develop from infants to adults, is unclear. The participants’ ability to perceive stimuli from phoneme continua will be assessed in identification and discrimination tasks. With respect to L1, the perceptual development of Dutch 5 to 7-year-olds is studied. We use phoneme contrasts that are comparable to the ones studied in L2 development, and study how child perception differs from adult perception, and how child perception changes over time.

MA thesis: Intonation in whispered speech. Correlates of production and perception.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. V.J. van Heuven

In normal speech, the fundamental frequency with which the speaker's vocal folds vibrate is an important cue in intonation perception. In whispered speech, however, the vocal folds do not vibrate, and therefore the fundamental frequency cue in intonation perception is absent. In this study we addressed the question how intonation is conveyed in whispered speech.

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Publications on current projects

To appear:

Ordelman, Heeren, Hiemstra, Huijbregts, De Jong (2009). Towards affordable disclosure of spoken heritage archives. Journal of Digital Information

2011

de Jong, F.M.G. and Heeren, W.F.L. and van Hessen, A.J. and Ordelman, R.J.F. and Nijholt, A. (2011) Automated Metadata Extraction for Semantic Access to Spoken Word Archives. (Invited) In: Proceedings 12th International Symposium on Social Communication, 17-21 September 2010, Santiago de Cuba. pp. 896-905. Centre for Applied Linguistics. ISBN 978-959-7174-19-6

2009

Heeren, W.F.L. and van der Werff, L.B. and de Jong, F.M.G. and Ordelman, R.J.F. and Verschoor, T. and van Hessen, A.J. and Langelaar, M. (2009) Easy Listening: Spoken Document Retrieval in CHoral. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 34 (2-3). pp. 236-252. ISSN 0308-0188 *** ISI Impact 0,360 ***
Malaisé, V. and Gazendam, L. and Heeren, W.F.L. and Ordelman, R.J.F. and Brugman, H. (2009) Relevance of ASR for the Automatic Generation of Keywords Suggestions for TV programs. In: Actes de la 16ème conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles, 24-26- June 2009, Senlis, France. Association pour le traitement automatique des langues. ISBN not assigned
Ordelman, R.J.F. and Heeren, W.F.L. and de Jong, F.M.G. and Huijbregts, M.A.H. and Hiemstra, D. (2009) Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Heritage Archives. Journal of Digital Information, 10 (6). 687:1-687:17. ISSN 1368-7506

2008

Aly, R.B.N. and Hauff, C. and Heeren, W.F.L. and Hiemstra, D. and de Jong, F.M.G. and Ordelman, R.J.F. and Verschoor, T. and de Vries, A.P. (2008) The Lowlands team at TRECVID 2007. In: TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation Online Proceedings, 5-6 Nov 2007, Geithesburg, U.S.. NIST. ISBN not assigned
Heeren, W.F.L. (2008) User requirements for access to Dutch spoken audio archives. Technical Report TR-CTIT-08-34, Centre for Telematics and Information Technology University of Twente, Enschede. ISSN 1381-3625
Heeren, W.F.L. and de Jong, F.M.G. (2008) Disclosing spoken culture: user interfaces for access to spoken word archives. In: People and computers XXII. Culture, creativity, interaction. Proceedings of HCI 2008, 1-5 Sept 2008, Liverpool, UK. pp. 23-32. The British Computer Society. ISBN 978-1-906124-04-5
Heeren, W.F.L. and de Jong, F.M.G. and van der Werff, L.B. and Huijbregts, M.A.H. and Ordelman, R.J.F. (2008) Evaluation of spoken document retrieval for historic speech collections. In: Proceedings of LREC 2008, 28-30 May 2008, Marrakech. 520. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). ISBN 2-9517408-4-0
Heeren, W.F.L. and Ordelman, R.J.F. and de Jong, F.M.G. (2008) Affordable access to multimedia by exploiting collateral data. In: Proceedings of CBMI 2008, 18-20 June 2008, London. pp. 542-550. IEEE. ISBN 978-1-4244-2044-5
Jansen, M. and Heeren, W.F.L. and van Dijk, E.M.A.G. (2008) Videotrees: Improving video surrogate presentation using hierarchy. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, 18-20 June, London. pp. 560-567. IEEE. ISBN 978-1-4244-2044-5
de Jong, F.M.G. and Oard, D.W. and Heeren, W.F.L. and Ordelman, R.J.F. (2008) Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), 1 (1). 3:1-3:27. ISSN 1556-4673
Ordelman, R.J.F. and Heeren, W.F.L. and Huijbregts, M.A.H. and Hiemstra, D. and de Jong, F.M.G. (2008) Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Word Archives. In: Proceedings of the ECDL 2008 Workshop on Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH2008), September 18, 2008, Aarhus, Denmark. ILPS, University of Amsterdam. ISBN 978-90-813489-1-1
van der Werff, L.B. and Heeren, W.F.L. (2008) Subword-based Indexing for a Minimal False Positive Rate. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Workshop "Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech", 24 July 2008, Singapore. pp. 77-79. Centre for Telematics and Information Technology University of Twente. ISBN 978-90-365-2697-5

2007

Heeren, W.F.L. and van der Werff, L.B. and Ordelman, R.J.F. and van Hessen, A.J. and de Jong, F.M.G. (2007) Radio Oranje: Searching the Queen's speech(es). In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGIR, 23-27 July 2007, Amsterdam. 903. ACM. ISBN 978-1-59593-597-7
van der Werff, L.B. and Heeren, W.F.L. (2007) Evaluating ASR Output for Information Retrieval. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech, 27 July 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 7-14. Centre for Telematics and Information Technology University of Twente. ISBN 978-90-365-2542-8
van der Werff, L.B. and Heeren, W.F.L. and Ordelman, R.J.F. and de Jong, F.M.G. (2007) Radio Oranje: Enhanced Access to a Historical Spoken Word Collection. In: Proceedings of the 17th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands, 12 Jan 2007, Leuven, Belgium. pp. 207-218. Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap. ISBN 978-90-78328-41-4

2006

van der Maas, P. and Heeren, W.F.L. and van Hessen, A.J. (2006) Het Radio Oranje Project 'Googlen' met Hare Majesteit Koningin Wilhelmina. DIXIT, Tijdschrift over Toegepaste Taal- en Spraaktechnologie, 4 (2). pp. 6-7. ISSN 1572-6037
Ordelman, R.J.F. and de Jong, F.M.G. and Heeren, W.F.L. (2006) Exploration of audiovisual heritage using audio indexing technology. In: Proceedings of the first workshop on intelligent technologies for cultural heritage exploitation, 28 Aug 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy. pp. 36-39. Università di Trento. ISBN not assigned
Ordelman, R.J.F. and de Jong, F.M.G. and Heeren, W.F.L. (2006) Exploration of audiovisual heritage using audio indexing technology. In: Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI2006), August 28 - September 1, Trento, Italy. IOS Press. ISBN 1-58603-642-4
Ordelman, R.J.F. and de Jong, F.M.G. and Heeren, W.F.L. and van Hessen, A.J. (2006) Audio Indexing Technology for the Exploration of Audiovisual Heritage Collections. In: Proceedings of BNAIC 2006, 5-6 Oct 2006, Namur, Belgium. pp. 413-414. BNVKI. ISSN 1568-7805

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Publications on earlier projects

2009

Heeren, W. & Van Heuven, V.J. (2009). Perception and production of boundary tones in whispered Dutch. Proceedings of Interspeech 2009, Brighton, UK, 2411-2414.


2008

Heeren, W. & Schouten, M.E.H. (2008). Perceptual development of phoneme contrasts: how sensitivity changes along acoustic dimensions that contrast phoneme categories. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 124(4), 2291-2302.

2006

Heeren, W. (2006). Perceptual Development of Phoneme Contrasts in Adults and Children. Doctoral dissertation. Utrecht University.

2005

Heeren, W. (2005). Perceptual Development of a Nonnative Length Contrast: Dutch Adults Learning Finnish /t-t:/. On the Proceedings CD of the ISCA workshop on Plasticity in Speech Perception 2005, UCL, London, pp. 32-35.
Heeren, W. (2005). Perceptual Development of the Duration Cue in Dutch /A-a:/. Proceedings of Interspeech 2005, Lisboa, 745-748.
Heeren, W. (2005). L2 Development of Quantity Perception: Dutch Listeners Learning Finnish /t-t:/. Proceedings of Interspeech 2005, Lisboa, 753-756.

2004

Heeren, W. (2004). The perceptual development of a British-English phoneme contrast in Dutch adults, Linguistics in the Netherlands 21, 91-101.
Heeren, W. (2004).The perceptual development of a new phoneme contrast by adult and 12-year-old listeners. Proceedings of From Sound to Sense: 50+ Years of Discoveries in Speech Communication, MIT, 11-13 June 2004, Boston MA, C31-C36.
Heeren, W. (2004).The perceptual development of a British-English phoneme contrast in Dutch adults, in H.Quené & V. van Heuven (eds.): On Speech and Language. Studies for Sieb G. Nooteboom, LOT Occasional Series, 73-82.
Heeren, W. (2004). The development of duration perception in Dutch /A-a:/. In Kerkhoff, de Lange & Sadeh Leicht (eds.): UiL OTS Yearbook 2004, 1-10.

2003

Heeren, W. (2003). The perceptual development of a new phoneme contrast in 12-year-old children. In W. Heeren, D. Papangeli & E. Vlachou (eds.): UiL OTS Yearbook 2003, 17-25.
Heeren, W., Papangeli, D., & Vlachou, E. (2003). UiL OTS Yearbook 2003.

2001

Hoeks, John, Heeren, Willemijn, and Stowe, Laurie (2001). Processing Implausible Sentences: An ERP Study on Making Sense, Proceedings of CUNY 2001.
Heeren, Willemijn (2001). Intonation in whispered speech. Correlates of production and perception. Unpublished masters thesis, Leiden University.


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Teaching experience

Leiden University, Linguistics

Internships, 2009

Supervising internships (BA, MPhil) in experimental phonetics



Erasmus Studio Summerschool 2008

Access to spoken word archives

Half-day course on development of user interfaces for access to spoken word archives



University of Twente, Human Media Interaction group

Capita Selecta, 2007, 2008:

Advanced course in which students do research on a particular topic in human media interaction

Bachelorreferaat, 2006, 2007:

BA course in which students perform their own research on spoken document retrieval



Utrecht University, Phonetics

Leren luisteren naar taal, fall 2005:

BA course on L1 and L2 perceptual acquisition

Practicum fonetiek, 2002-2005:

Practical course, BA level, on analysis and synthesis of speech



Short CV

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General


Name: Willemijn Heeren
Date of birth: September 19th 1978
Place of birth: Tilburg, The Netherlands
Nationality: Dutch


Academic education

2002-2006: PhD in Phonetics, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University
PhD Thesis: Perceptual Development of Phoneme Contrasts in Adults and Children.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. S.G. Nooteboom, Dr. M.E.H. Schouten

Fall 2002: Work visit to University College London, UK

1998-2001: MA in Linguistics (cum laude) from Leiden University
MA Thesis: Intonation in whispered speech. Correlates of production and perception.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. V.J. van Heuven

Fall 2000: Internship Neurolinguistics, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Supervisors: Dr. L.A. Stowe, Dr. J.C.J. Hoeks

1996-1998: Propedeuse Mathematics, Leiden University