Lucy is a researcher in AI and Data Science for English Language Research at the British Council. With an interdisciplinary background in linguistics and computer science, her role involves evaluating natural language processing (NLP) approaches for language learning and assessment tools. Lucy holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Sheffield, where her research focused on adapting AI models for disfluency detection in spoken learner English. In addition to her work on disfluency detection, Lucy is interested in the application of spoken dialogue systems for language learning and assessment.    

Areas of expertise

  • Natural language processing  
  • Disfluency detection 
  • Spoken dialogue systems 

Publications

Skidmore, L., & Moore, R. K. (2023). BERT models for disfluency detection of spoken learner English. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE), pp. 91-92, Dublin, Ireland. ISCA. https://www.isca-archive.org/slate_2023/skidmore23_slate.html 

Skidmore, L., & Moore, R. K. (2022). Incremental disfluency detection for spoken learner English. In Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2022), pp. 272–278, Seattle, Washington. ACL. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.bea-1.31 

Skidmore, L., & Moore, R. K. (2019). Using Alexa for flashcard-based learning. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019, pp. 1846-1850, Graz, Austria. ISCA. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2893 

Education

  • PhD, Computer Science, University of Sheffield, 2023. 
  • MSc, Computer Science with Speech and Language Processing, University of Sheffield, 2018. 
  • BA (Hons), Linguistics and Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield, 2015.  
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