In the Language Bank: Sofoklis Kakouros

Who are you?

I am Sofoklis Kakouros, a postdoctoral researcher with the Phonetics and Speech Synthesis Research Group in the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki. Before joining this group, I held research positions at different universities across Finland and in the Netherlands, and I also worked in the industry as a speech scientist. My background centers on signal processing, cognitive science, and phonetics.

What is your research topic?

My research interests are rooted in speech and language, with a particular emphasis on understanding prosody and its associated phenomena. Prosody is about how we say something rather than what we say; it adds meaning beyond the words themselves. This includes elements like intonation and timing. Over the years, I have explored various aspects of prosody, focusing on information-theoretic processes within this domain. Overall, my work enhances our comprehension of how acoustic and linguistic variations are statistically organized into the prosody we perceive. For the past years, I have been working in the Research Council of Finland project titled ”Computational Modeling of Prosody in Speech”, aiming to understand the statistical organization in speech acoustics and its connections to prosodic dimensions such as prominence and emotions. This research has numerous applications, including the prosodic analysis of dialectal varieties and parliamentary speech.

How is your research related to Kielipankki?

To effectively analyze and train computational models for speech, an increasing amount of data is required. Kielipankki offers a diverse platform that provides access to the essential resources needed for my research, including materials for speech and language studies. In a recent project conducted by our group, I utilized the  from Kielipankki to analyze recordings of Finnish parliamentary speeches.

Recent publications

Vainio, M., Suni, A., Šimko, J., and Kakouros, S. (2024). . In Proceedings of the Conference of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group (SProSIG) of the International Speech Communication Association – Speech Prosody (SpeechPro-2024), Leiden, The Netherlands, pp. 662–666.

Kakouros, S., Šimko, J., Vainio, M., and Suni, A. (2023). . In Proceedings of the 12th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW-2023), Grenoble, France, pp. 127–133.

Kakouros, S. and O’Mahony, J. (2023). In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-2023) (pp. 1454-1458). GUARANT International spol. s r.o.., Prague, Czechia.

Kakouros, S., Stafylakis, T., Mošner, L., and Burget, L. (2023). . In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP-2023), Rhodes, Greece, pp. 1–5.

Corpora

The  consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers of Social Sciences and Humanities to use, refine, preserve and share their language resources.  is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.