Tom Lentz

Tom Lentz is an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University's Department of Communication and Cognition within the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. His research focuses on prosody, speech recognition, computational linguistics, and human-agent interaction. Notable projects include analyzing stress processing in end-to-end ASR models and investigating prosody alignment in voice agents to enhance perceived human-likeness. He serves on the board of the Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen.

Research interests span prosodic features in speech synthesis, implicit causality in language models, and cross-linguistic speech timing. His work combines experimental psycholinguistics with computational methods, addressing challenges in synthetic speech interpretation and AI interpretability. Recent contributions include studies on voice agent persuasiveness and multidimensional signal analysis in human speech.

Teaching responsibilities include courses on annotation, programming fundamentals, and voice-body language dynamics. His publications bridge theoretical linguistic inquiry with applied AI research, emphasizing practical implications for conversational agent design and speech technology development.