Dr. Vered Silber-Varod

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Dr. Vered Silber-Varod has been working as a Linguist at the Afeka Center for Language Processing (ACLP) since its inception in 2009. Dr. Silber-Varod also teaches an undergraduate course in natural language processing (NLP), and supervises student graduation projects at the Afeka Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering, Tel Aviv, Israel. Dr. Silber-Varod holds a B.A. in Political Science and French Language and Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; an MA (Magna Com Lauda) in Hebrew and Semitic Languages from Tel Aviv University, Israel; and a Ph.D., Faculty of Humanities, from Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Contact Information

Office: +972-3-768-8756

Email: ver edsv@afeka.ac.il

Fields of Interest

Speech prosody
Acoustic phonetics
Corpus linguistics
Spoken language
Hebrew language and linguistics

ACLP Projects

Magneton 2011-present, with Nice Systems Ltd.
Phonetic Search Based on Cross-Language Phoneme Transformation

Magneton 2009-2011, with SpeechModules Ltd.
An Efficient Algorithm for Voicemail Transcription

Publications

Journal Publications

Silber-Varod, Vered. 2012. Hesitation disfluencies or predictable patterns? Towards a definition of Continuous Elongation as prosodic boundary tone. Hebrew Linguistics 66: 83-105 (in Hebrew; English abstract).

Shlomo Izre’el and Vered Silber-Varod. 2009. Prosodic Units in Spoken Hebrew: Perception, Acoustic Cues and Syntax. Hebrew Linguistics A Journal for Hebrew Descriptive Computational Linguistics 62-63(in Hebrew; English abstract).

Mettouchi, Amina, Anne Lacheret-Dujour, Vered Silber-Varod and Shlomo Izre’el. 2007. Only Prosody? Perception of Speech Segmentation in Kabyle and Hebrew.Nouveaux cahiers de linguistiquefrançaise 28. pp. 207-218.

Conference Proceedings and Presentations

Tal Levy, Vered Silber-Varod and Ami Moyal, “The Effect of Pitch, Intensity and Pause Duration in Punctuation Detection,” IEEE 27-th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel IEEEI 2012, Novermber 14-17, 2012, Eilat, Israel.

Noam Lotner, Ella Tetariy, Vered Silber-Varod, Vered Aharonson, Ami Moyal, Ruth Aloni-Lavi, Yossi Bar-Yosef, and Irit Opher, “Cross-Language Phoneme Recognition for Under-Resourced Languages”, IEEE 27-th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel IEEEI 2012, November 14-17, 2012, Eilat, Israel. (presentation).

Yossi Bar-Yosef, Irit Opher, Ruth Aloni-Lavi, Noam Lotner, Ella Tetariy, Vered Silber-Varod, Vered Aharonson and Ami Moyal, “Automatic Learning of Phonetic Mappings for Cross-Language Phonetic-Search in Keyword Spotting”, IEEE 27-th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel IEEEI 2012, November 14-17, 2012, Eilat, Israel.

Tal Levy, Vered Silber-Varod and Ami Moyal, “Automatic Speech Punctuation Using Prosodic Cues,” Acoustics and Audio 2012, September 13, 2012, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. (abstract).

Bar-Yosef Y., Aloni-Lavi R., Opher I., Tetariy E., Lotner N., Silber-Varod V., Aharonson V. & Moyal A (2012). "Cross-Language Phonetic-Search for Keyword Spotting." Paper presented at the 2012 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel June 19-20, 2012.

Aharonson E., V. Aharonson, T. Porat and V. Silber-Varod. 2012. The Perceptual Effect of Prosody in Voice-activated System Responses. Paper presented at the 2012 Speech Processing Conference, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 19-20, 2012.

Silber-Varod V. 2012. The Promonominal Nature of Hesitation Disfluencies: Evidence from Spontaneous Spoken Hebrew. Paper presented at The Fifth International Conference on Cognitive Science, Kalingrad, Russia, June 19-23, 2012.

Vered Silber-Varod. 2011. The SpeeCHain Perspective: Prosody-Syntax Interface in Spontaneous Spoken Hebrew. IGDAL 2011 - First International Graduate Student Conference on Diverse Approaches to Linguistics, Jerusalem, October 23, 2011.

Vered Silber-Varod, Dependencies over Prosodic Boundary Tones in Spontaneous Spoken Hebrew. Depling 2011 – International Conference on Dependency Linguistics, Barcelona, September 5-7 2011, pp. 241-250.

Gishri Michal, Silber-Varod Vered, Moyal Ami. 2010. Lexicon design for Transcription of Spontaneous Voice Messages. In the proceedings of The seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)

Vered Silber-Varod.2010. Phonological aspects of hesitation disfluences.Speech Prosody 2010, Chicago, IL, May 2010.

Vered Silber-Varod and LoїcKessous. 2008. Prosodic boundary patterns in Hebrew: A case study of continuous intonation units in weather forecast. In P. A. Barbosa, S. Madureira, and C. Reis, (Eds.), Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2008 ConferenceCampinas, Brazil: Editora RG/CNPq., pp 265-268.

Noam Amir, Vered Silber-Varod and Shlomo Izre'el. 2004. Characteristics of intonation unit boundaries in spontaneous spoken Hebrew: Perception and acoustic correlates,Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Speech Prosody - SP2004, Nara, Japan, 2004, pp. 677-680.

Student Studies Supervised

Year	Student	Supervised Study	Academic Institution	Title
2011-2012	Mr. Tal Levy	Final B.Sc. Project	Department of Electrical Engineering, Afeka Academic College of Engineering	"Automatic Speech Transcription and Punctuation"