Associate Professor · Speech Tech · AI Ethics
Campus Fryslân, University of Groningen
I work at the intersection of speech technology, AI governance, and language diversity. At the University of Groningen, I direct the MSc Speech Technology program and head the Governance & Technology Department. My research covers speech synthesis, recognition, and evaluation, and the ethics of AI systems more broadly. I chair ethics at INTERSPEECH 2025–2026 and IEEE ASLI 2027, serve on the ISCA Ethics Committee, and evaluate research for the European Commission.
Recent Publications & Pre-prints (click to expand)
- Li, Z., Nayak, S., & Coler, M. (2026). What Makes Synthetic Speech Sound Sarcastic? A Prosody-Controlled Perception Study. Interspeech 2026.
- Li, Z., Zhang, Y., Gao, X., Nayak, S., & Coler, M. (2026). Modeling Sarcastic Speech: Semantic and Prosodic Cues in a Speech Synthesis Framework. CogSci 2026, Rio de Janeiro.
- Amooie, R., Hao, Y., de Vries, W., Dijkstra, J. E., Coler, M., & Wieling, M. (2026). Improving low-resource ASR using bilingual fine-tuning with language identification: a cross-linguistic evaluation. SPEAKABLE @ LREC 2026.
- Li, Z., Chen, Y., Lai, H., Gao, X., Nayak, S., & Coler, M. (2026). SarcasmMiner: A Dual-Track Post-Training Framework for Robust Audio-Visual Sarcasm Reasoning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05275.