Professor Heidi Christensen
PhD
School of Computer Science
Head of School
Professor of Spoken Language Technology
Member of the Speech and Hearing (SpandH) research group
+44 114 222 1950
Full contact details
School of Computer Science
Regent Court (CS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP
- Profile
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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 is the current Head of School and has a long-term interest in EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion), serving as the Faculty Director of EDI (2020-2022).
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
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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
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Journal articles
- . Speech Communication, 179, 103379-103379.
- . Computer Speech & Language, 95, 101839-101839.
- . Alzheimer's & Dementia, 21(S2).
- . Alzheimer's & Dementia, 21(S3).
- . IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 29(12), 8727-8734.
- CognoSpeak: An automatic, remote assessment of early cognitive decline using speech. Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association, 21(Suppl 2).
- Developing a more equitable language鈥恇ased automated assessment of cognition: CognoSpeak. Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association, 21(Suppl 3).
- . Applied Sciences, 15(11).
- . 2025 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Health and Medicine (CIHM), 1-7.
- . ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 1-2.
- . Proceedings of the ISCA/ITG Workshop on Diversity in Large Speech and Language Models.
- . IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 33, 896-907.
- . IEEE Access, 12, 122840-122851.
- . Language and Health, 2(1), 32-38.
- . PLOS ONE, 19(3).
- . Seizure: European Journal of Epilepsy, 114, 84-89.
- . Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 38(9), 880-901.
- . Alzheimer's & Dementia, 19(S14).
- . Alzheimer's & Dementia, 19(S20).
- . Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 94(12), e2.9-e2.9.
- . Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders, 14(3), 408-429.
- . PLOS ONE, 18(8).
- . Applied Sciences, 13(11).
- . Epilepsy & Behavior, 143.
- . The European Journal of Health Economics, 24(6), 853-865.
- . Applied Sciences, 12(17).
- . JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY NEUROSURGERY AND PSYCHIATRY, 93(9).
- . Journal of Medical Engineering & Technology, 46(6).
- . Alzheimer's & Dementia, 17(S5).
- . Seizure, 91, 141-145.
- . Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 92(8), A7.1-A7.
- 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.
- . Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 35(3), 237-252.
- . Speech Communication, 126, 44-60.
- . Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 92(1), 12-15.
- . Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 91(8), e18.2-e19.
- . Dementia, 19(4), 1173-1188.
- . Neurology, 94(15_supplement).
- . Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 90(12).
- . Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 90(12).
- . Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(5).
- . PLoS ONE, 14(5).
- . Computer Speech and Language, 53, 65-79.
- . SoftwareX, 8, 69-70.
- . Digital Signal Processing, 77, 207-221.
- . Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 88(Suppl 1), A19.4-A20.
- . Computer Speech & Language, 46, 196-208.
- . Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 242, 306-313.
- . Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 58(2), 373-387.
- . ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 7(2), 1-8.
- . ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 6(4), 1-2.
- . ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 6(3), 1-3.
- . Computer Speech and Language.
- . Computer Speech and Language.
- . IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, 20(3), 818-827.
- Improving source localisation in multi-source, reverberant conditions: exploiting local spectro-temporal location cues.. Abstract for Acoust. Soc. Am. mtg.
- . IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, 16(1), 151-161.
- . PLOS One, 20(12), e0338220-e0338220.
- . Healthcare, 13(22), 2885-2885.
- . IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 30, 2968-2980.
- . Cancers, 13(19), 4846-4846.
- 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).
Book chapters
- , Harnessing the Power of Technology to Improve Lives IOS Press
- , Harnessing the Power of Technology to Improve Lives IOS Press
Conference proceedings
- . Speech and Computer: 27th International Conference, SPECOM 2025, Szeged, Hungary, October 13鈥15, 2025, Proceedings, Part I(LNAI 16187) (pp 203-216). Szeged, Hungary, 13 October 2025 - 13 October 2025.
- . Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2025 (pp 499-503). Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 17 August 2025 - 17 August 2025.
- . Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025 (pp 19169-19178), November 2025 - November 2025.
- Early Dementia Detection Using Multiple Spontaneous Speech Prompts: The PROCESS Challenge.. ICASSP (pp 1-2)
- . 2024 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICNLP) (pp 124-128), 22 March 2024 - 24 March 2024.
- . 2023 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) (pp 1-6), 16 December 2023 - 20 December 2023.
- . ICASSP 2023 - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). Rhodes Island, Greece, 4 June 2023 - 4 June 2023.
- . 2023 IEEE 17th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) (pp 1-8), 5 January 2023 - 8 January 2023.
- Feasibility of automated longitudinal cognitive and mood assessment in the stroke pathway. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF STROKE, Vol. 18(1) (pp 61-62)
- TOWARDS DISFLUENCY FEATURES FOR SPEECH TECHNOLOGY BASED AUTOMATIC DEMENTIA CLASSIFICATION. 20TH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF PHONETIC SCIENCES, ICPHS 2023 (pp 3907-3911)
- . Interspeech 2022: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp 3958-3962). Incheon, Korea, 18 September 2022 - 18 September 2022.
- . Epilepsia, Vol. 63(S2) (pp 271-271). Geneva. Switzerland and online, 9 July 2022 - 9 July 2022.
- . ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp 7372-7376), 23 May 2022 - 27 May 2022.
- . 2021 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII). Nara, Japan (virtual conference), 28 September 2021 - 28 September 2021.
- . Interspeech 2021 (pp 2946-2950). Brno, Czechia, 30 August 2021 - 30 August 2021.
- (pp 58-69)
- . ICASSP 2021 - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp 7258-7262), 6 June 2021 - 11 June 2021.
- . BJPsych Open, Vol. 7(S1) (pp S7-S7). Virtual, 21 June 2021 - 24 June 2021.
- Investigating the feasibility of automating the differential diagnosis of Transient Loss of Consciousness. EPILEPSIA, Vol. 62 (pp 354-355)
- Using the Outputs of Different Automatic Speech Recognition Paradigms for Acoustic- and BERT-Based Alzheimer's Dementia Detection Through Spontaneous Speech.. Interspeech (pp 3810-3814)
- Identifying Cognitive Impairment Using Sentence Representation Vectors.. Interspeech (pp 2941-2945)
- . Alzheimer's & Dementia, Vol. 16(S6). Chicago, IL, USA (online), 9 November 2020 - 9 November 2020.
- . Interspeech 2020 (pp 2182-2186). Shanghai, China, 25 October 2020 - 29 October 2020.
- . Interspeech 2020 (pp 4821-4825). Shanghai, China, 25 October 2020 - 29 October 2020.
- . Proceedings of Interspeech 2020 (pp 4581-4585). Shanghai, China (Online), 25 October 2020 - 25 October 2020.
- . Proceedings of Interspeech 2020 (pp 4961-4965). Shanghai, China, 25 October 2020 - 29 October 2020.
- . Interspeech 2020, 25 October 2020 - 25 October 2020.
- . Proceedings of Interspeech 2020 (pp 4806-4810). Shanghai, China, 25 October 2020 - 25 October 2020.
- . Proceedings of the 45th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2020) (pp 7424-7428). Barcelona, Spain, 4 May 2020 - 4 May 2020.
- . Proceedings of the 45th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2020) (pp 6094-6098). Barcelona, Spain, 4 May 2020 - 4 May 2020.
- Deep learning of articulatory-based representations and applications for improving dysarthric speech recognition. Speech Communication 13th ITG Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation (pp 331-335)
- . Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp 4105-4109). Graz, Austria, 15 September 2019 - 19 September 2019.
- . ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp 5836-5840), 12 May 2019 - 17 May 2019.
- . ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp 2732-2736), 12 May 2019 - 17 May 2019.
- . 2018 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) (pp 976-981). Miyazaki, Japan, 7 October 2018 - 7 October 2018.
- . 2018 40th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) (pp 1952-1955). Honolulu, Hawaii, 18 July 2018 - 18 July 2018.
- . Interspeech 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)
- . Proceedings of the International Conference on Bioinformatics Research and Applications 2017 (pp 57-61)
- . Journal of the Neurological Sciences, Vol. 381 (pp 319-319)
- . Interspeech 2017 (pp 3147-3151). Stockholm, Sweden, 20 August 2017 - 20 August 2017.
- . ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings (pp 5090-5094). New Orleans, LA, USA, 5 March 2017 - 5 March 2017.
- . ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings (pp 2966-2970). New Orleans, LA, USA, 5 March 2017 - 5 March 2017.
- (pp 269-278)
- . Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, Vol. 242 (pp 322-329). Netherlands
- . Proceedings of 2016 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA) (pp 1-5). Jeju, South Korea, 13 December 2016 - 13 December 2016.
- . Proceedings of Interspeech (pp 1220-1224). San Francisco, CA, 8 September 2016 - 8 September 2016.
- A Framework for Collecting Realistic Recordings of Dysarthric Speech - the homeService Corpus. Proceedings of LREC 2016. Portoro啪, Slovenia, 24 May 2016 - 24 May 2016.
- . SLPAT 2016 Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies
- . Proceedings of SLPAT 2015: 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (pp 97-102), September 2015 - September 2015.
- . Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (pp 12-21), September 2015 - September 2015.
- . IET International Conference on Technologies for Active and Assisted Living (TechAAL) (pp 6 .-6 .)
- Introduction. Slpat 2015 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies Proceedings (pp III)
- Adaptive speech recognition and dialogue management for users with speech disorders. Proceedings of Interspeech鈥14
- . 2014 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) (pp 254-259), 7 December 2014 - 10 December 2014.
- Dysarthria Intelligibility Assessment in a Factor Analysis Total Variability Space. 滨苍迟别谤蝉辫别别肠丑鈥13
- Combining in-domain and out-of-domain speech data for automatic recognition of disordered speech. 滨苍迟别谤蝉辫别别肠丑鈥13
- Learning speaker-specific pronunciations of disordered speech. 14TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION (INTERSPEECH 2013), VOLS 1-5 (pp 1158-1162)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- Learning speaker-specific pronunciations of disordered speech. 滨苍迟别谤蝉辫别别肠丑鈥13
- 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)
- Studio report: Linux audio for multi-speaker natural speech technology.. Proc. Linux Audio Conference
- 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
- 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)
- Recent advances in fragment-based speech recognition in reverberant multisource environments.. Proceedings of ISCA Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (pp 68-73)
- Binaural cues for fragment-based speech recognition in reverberant multisource environments. Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2011 (pp 1657-1660)
- 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鈥11) (pp 207-212)
- Speaker turn tracking with mobile microphones: Combining location and pitch information. European Signal Processing Conference (pp 954-958)
- 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
- 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)
- . ICASSP IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings (pp 4593-4596)
- 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)
- The CAVA corpus: synchronised stereoscopic and binaural datasets with head movements.. ICMI (pp 109-116)
- 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)
- Active binaural distance estimation for dynamic sources. International Speech Communication Association 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Interspeech 2007, Vol. 2 (pp 933-936)
- Multi-stage compaction approach to broadcast news summarisation. 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (pp 69-72)
- Maximum entropy segmentation of broadcast news. 2005 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOLS 1-5 (pp 1029-1032)
- INTRODUCING PHONETICALLY MOTIVATED, HETEROGENEOUS INFORMATION INTO AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION. INTEGRATION OF PHONETIC KNOWLEDGE IN SPEECH TECHNOLOGY, Vol. 25 (pp 67-86)
- . Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, Vol. 2997 (pp 223-237)
- 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)
- 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)
- Punctuation Annotation Using Statistical Prosody Models. Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding (pp 35-40)
- Introducing Phonetically Motivated Information into ASR. Proceedings of Eurospeech 2001
- Employing Heterogeneous Information in a Multi-Stream Framework. Proceedings of ICASSP 2000
- Noise robustness of heterogeneous features employing minimum classification error feature space transformations.. INTERSPEECH (pp 534-537)
- . Interspeech 2025 (pp 5288-5292)
- . Interspeech 2025 (pp 1423-1427)
- . Interspeech 2022 (pp 2458-2462)
- . Interspeech 2022 (pp 2463-2467)
- . Interspeech 2022
- . Interspeech 2021
- . Interspeech 2021 (pp 2941-2945)
- Towards the understanding of communicating emotions for people with dysarthria. Proceedings of WSPD 2018. Mysore, India, 8 September 2018 - 8 September 2018.
- . Interspeech 2016 (pp 1608-1612)
- . Interspeech 2007 (pp 2769-2772)
Reports
- Inferring perceiver actions from binaural data
- Synchronized stereoscopic and binaural dataset with head movements : Recording details
Theses
- Speech Recognition using Heterogenous Information Extraction in Multi-Stream Based Systems.
- Speaker Adaptation of Hidden Markov Models using Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression.
Working papers
- Automatic Hierarchical Attention Neural Network for Detecting AD.
Datasets
- .
Other
- Simultaneous Tracking of Perceiver Movements and Speaker Changes Using Head-Centered, Binaural Data.
- POPeye: Real-time, binaural sound source localisation on an audio-visual robot-head.
Preprints
- Can we trust AI to detect healthy multilingual English speakers among the cognitively impaired cohort in the UK? An investigation using real-world conversational speech, arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , JMIR Publications Inc..
- Grants
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- CognoStroke - automated assessment of cognition and mood in stroke survivors, Rosetrees Trust, 03/2025 - 02/2028, 拢66,462, as Co-I
- , EPSRC, 04/2019 - 09/2027, 拢5,508,850, as Co-I
- Deep learning of articulatory-based representations of dysarthric speech, Google, 02/2016 - 12/2026, 拢46,624, as PI
- Design and development of CognoMND, LifeArc, 01/07/2024 - 30/06/2027, 拢209,000 as Co-I
- The automated coding of expressed emotion to enhance clinical and epidemiological mental health research in adolescence, MRC, 11/2022 - 12/2024, 拢379,598, as Co-I
- CcHAT Project Management Resource Uplift, Department of Health and Social Care, 02/2022 - 07/2025, 拢436,161, as Co-I
- Interdisciplinary project on COMPutational Assessment of Stroke Survivors (COMPASS), Rosetrees Trust, 02/2020 - 08/2024, 拢124,864, as PI
- CognoSpeak-eQMS, EPSRC, 01/01/2023 - 31/12/2023, 拢22,904, as PI
- Participatory co-design of a platform for collecting atypical speech data, Research England, 03/2022 - 07/2022, 拢19,692, as Co-I
- CognoSpeak UX, Research England, 06/2021 - 02/2022, 拢27,694, as PI
- COMPASS: COMPutational Assessment of Stroke Survivors, Research England, 11/2019 - 06/2020, 拢48,886, as PI
- COCOA: COmputerised COgnitive Assessment, MRC, 10/2018 to 09/2019, 拢49,513, as PI
- TAPAS: , EU H2020, 11/2017 - 09/2022, 拢468,000, as PI
- CloudVent: Cloud-based speech recognition for people with paralysis using ventilators, RCUK, 10/2015 - 04/2016, 拢360,000, as Co-I
- Professional activities and memberships
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- Member of the research group
- Member of the ISCA Diversity Committee
- Co-organiser of ASRU 2021
- Co-organiser of Interspeech 2023