Aaricia Herygers
Linguist in Tech
CV
Interested in German, phonetics, and speech technology.
Passionate about inclusive ASR, SciComm, and empowering women.
Research and Development for Speech Recognition Research and Data Science in Persuasive Communication Research in Speech Processing in the project "Hochschul-Assistenz-System" Data Science and MLOps Multidisciplinary program combining speech and technology
Honors program: "Leadership: Making the difference!"
Thesis: "Spraakherkenning, wa is da? — Bias in Flemish Speech Recognition"
• Student representative in the University Education Committee and Honors Program Committee Formal and Computational Linguistics
Thesis: "Language Learning Motivation of Flemish Secondary School Students"
• Student representative in the Linguistics Program Committee Dutch, English, German
Erasmus exchange semester at Leipzig University | 2019-2020
Thesis: "The influence of Flemish pupils' attitudes toward German on their language acquisition"
Experience
Education
Languages and Skills
Dutch, English, German, Spanish
Praat, Python, R, SPSS, HTML/XML, SQL, Docker, Bash, Streamlit
Scholarships & Awards
Interspeech 2024 | International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Travel Grant (Kos, Greece)
ALPS 2024 | Scholarship to attend the Advanced Language Processing School 2024 (Aussois, France)
YFRSW 2022 | Scholarship to attend the Young Female Researchers in Speech Workshop 2022 (Incheon, South Korea)
EuroSLA 2022 | Scholarship to attend the 31st Conference of the European Second Language Association 2022 (Fribourg, Switzerland)
Language Industry Award | 2022 Student Grand Prize | Bias in Flemish ASR
Language Industry Award | 2021 Student Popularization Prize | Language learning motivation
Service and Leadership
Interspeech 2025 | Publicity Committee | 2025
ISCA-SAC | Board Member (Doctoral Consortium & Social Media) | 2024
YFRSW 2024 | Co-organizer | 2024
KONVENS 2023 | Local Chair | 2022-2023
YFRSW 2023 | Invited Panelist (PhD Panel) | 2023
ISCA-SAC | Volunteer (Organization Doctoral Consortium 2023) | 2022-2023
Junge Sprachwissenschaft e.V. | StuTS Contact Person | 2021-2024
ILLSA | Network Development Officer | 2021-2022
72. StuTS | Publicity Chair | 2021-2022
71. StuTS + 31. TaCoS | Coordination Chair | 2021-2022
Publications
Publications
Winkler, L., Schindler, M., Herygers, A., Gaida, C., Gräßer, F., Petrick, R., Eisenhaber, F., Henker, M. (2025). Modular Text Normalization Pipeline for Language Model Training. Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2025.
Ranzenberger, T., Bocklet, T., Freisinger, S., Georges, M., Glocker, K., Herygers, A., Riedhammer, K., Schneider, F., Simic, C., & Zakaria, K. (2024). Extending HAnS: Large Language Models for Question Answering, Summarization, and Topic Segmentation in an ML-based Learning Experience Platform. Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2024.
Zhang, Y., Herygers, A., Patel, T., Yue, Z., & Scharenborg, O. (2023). Exploring data augmentation in bias mitigation against non-native-accented speech. IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop.
Georges, M., Herygers, A., Friedrich, A., Roth, B. (2023) Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2023). Association for Computational Lingustics.
Hartung, K., Herygers, A., Kurlekar, S., Zakaria, K., Volkan, T., Gröttrup, S., & Georges, M. (2023). Measuring sentiment bias in machine translation. Text, Speech, and Dialogue: 26th International Conference, TSD 2023. pp. 82-93.
Freisinger, S., Schneider, F., Herygers, A., Georges, M., Bocklet, T., & Riedhammer, K. (2023). Unsupervised Multilingual Topic Segmentation of Video Lectures: What can Hierarchical Labels tell us about the Performance?. 9th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2023). pp. 141-145.
Glocker, K., Herygers, A., & Georges, M., (2023). Allophant: Cross-lingual phoneme recognition with articulatory attributes. Proc. Interspeech 2023. pp. 2258-2262.
Herygers, A., Verkhodanova, V., Coler, M., Scharenborg, O., & Georges, M. (2023). Bias in Flemish Automatic Speech Recognition. Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2023. pp. 158–165.
Ranzenberger, T., Bocklet, T., Freisinger, S., Frischholz, L., Georges, M., Glocker, K., Herygers, A., Peinl, R., Riedhammer, K., Schneider, F., Simic, C., & Zakaria, K. (2023). The Hochschul-Assistenz-System HAnS: An ML-based Learning Experience Platform. Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2023. pp. 168–169.
Presentations
Herygers, A., Verkhodanova, V., Coler, M., Scharenborg, O., & Georges, M. (2022, September 17). Spraakherkenning, wa is da? — Bias in Flemish speech recognition [Poster presentation]. YFRSW, Incheon, South Korea.
Herygers, A., & Peters, E. (2022, August 24-27). Language learning motivation of Flemish secondary-school students [Poster presentation]. EuroSLA 31, Fribourg, Switzerland.