Chilin Shih

Dr. Chilin Shih is a Chinese linguist in phonology, phonetics and speech. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature: It is situated in the intersection of linguistics, speech technologies and language teaching. She has worked for ten years on multilingual text-to-speech systems at Bell Laboratories before joining UIUC, and has continued the linguistic work analyzing multilingual prosodic systems and building models to predict prosody from text, including intonation models and duration models.  She has applied speech technologies in language teaching and has built a tone training and testing system Prosody Tutor under an NSF grant. The Prosody Tutor uses an adaptive approach to prosody tutoring and adjusts teaching materials automatically according to students' previous responses. Dr. Shih had another NSF grant working on second language fluency evaluation. The project is based on data collected from the creative output paradigm that she implemented in the third year and fourth year Chinese language classes at UIUC, where the curriculum centers around public speaking training exercises such as debates, interviews, and speeches.