Hazel Morton graduated from the University of Glasgow
in 1995 with an undergraduate MA (Hons) in English, and
from the University of Durham in 2000 with a postgraduate
MA in Applied Linguistics.
Since October
2000, Hazel has worked at the University of Edinburgh as a research
associate. Her main academic interests are in the areas of speech
recognition technology, embodied conversational agents, and their
applications. Specifically, Hazel is interested in the use of
conversational agents, who express verbal and non-verbal communicative
behaviours, for eCommerce and eLearning applications.
As part of the SPELL project, she is currently undertaking research in the
use of embodied conversational agents in contextualised
virtual environments for the teaching of languages.
The project aims to develop language learning software
for the teaching of French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese
and English as a Foreign Language.
In 2007, Hazel completed a part-time PhD on the speech-interactive
CALL program. The thesis explores, through a series
of empirical evaluations, user attitudes towards the
CALL program and the reliability of the speech recogniser
used by non-native speakers in this context.
email
Dr Hazel Morton
