Tsz Kin Lam

AI Researcher in NLP and Speech

Hello! I became part of the NatWest Group's CAIRO team as a Generative AI Research Engineer, where I worked closely with Maja Pantic, Sourav Bhattacharya, Sinisa Todorovic and an exceptional team to create cutting-edge, hyper-personalized conversational AI agents. Previously, I was a researcher and a GAIL Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where I collaborated with Alexandra Birch, Barry Haddow, members from the machine translation team and CSTR. I earned my BSc in Physics from HKUST, Master and PhD at Heidelberg University in Germany, where I was fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Stefan Riezler.

I am broadly interested in machine learning for sequence modelling, with a particular focus on NLP and Speech. My current research focus is around speech LLM, post-training and human-agent collaboration. An intermediate goal is to enhance voice interaction between humans and agents. If you are interested this areas, feel free to connect and chat!

Contact me

Professional Experience

NatWest Group

Generative AI Research Engineer • November, 2025 — Present

University of Edinburgh

Research Associate • April, 2023 — November 2025

Amazon

Applied Scientist Intern • Nov, 2021 — May, 2022

Microsoft

Research Intern • Mar, 2020 — Jun, 2020

eBay

Research Intern • Oct, 2018 — Jan, 2019

SAP

Working Student • Sep, 2016 — Mar, 2018

Grants and Fellowships

NVIDIA Academic Grant Program • April, 2025 — September, 2025

Shared with Alexandra Birch and Barry Haddow

Generative AI Laborartory (GAIL) Fellow • Nov, 2024 — Nov, 2025

Professional Services

Organizer: IWSLT (Offline Track) 2024-2025

Area Chair: ACL Rolling Review (ARR)

Reviewer: ARR, ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, Computational Linguistics (CL), TACL, TALLIP, TASLP

Teaching and Coaching Experience

University of Edinburgh:

Guest lecture for "NLU, Generation and Machine Translation (2024)"

Heidelberg University, Germany (2019 - 2022):

Software practical on NAR Machine Translation and Word-Level Auto-Completion

Optimising Data Usage in Neural Sequence-To-Sequence Learning

Deep Learning in Speech-to-Text Translation

Recent Advances in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

Publications

2025

G. Zhou, T.K. Lam, A. Birch, B. Haddow "The Prosody of Emojis" Under Review

Agostinelli et. al "Findings of the IWSLT 2025 Evaluation Campaign" IWSLT 2025

K. Ambilduke, B. Peters, S. Sannigrahi, A. Keshiwani, T.K. Lam, B. Martins, M.Z. Boito, A. FT Martins "From tower to spire: Adding the speech modality to a text-only llm" EMNLP 2025 (Findings)

T.K. Lam, M. Gaido, S. Papi, L. Bentivogli, B. Haddow "Prepending or Cross-Attention for Speech-to-Text? An Empirical Comparison" NAACL 2025

2024

IS Ahmad et. al "Findings of the IWSLT 2024 Evaluation Campaign" IWSLT 2024

T.K. Lam, A. Birch, B. Haddow "Compact Speech Translation Models via Discrete Speech Units Pretraining" IWSLT 2024

G. Zhou, T.K. Lam, A. Birch, B. Haddow "Prosody in Cascade and Direct Speech-to-Text Translation: a case study on Korean Wh-Phrases" EACL 2024 (Findings)

V. Zouhar, P. Chen, T.K. Lam, N. Moghe, B. Haddow "Pitalls and outlooks in using COMET" WMT 2024

T.K. Lam "Improving Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Learning via Data Enhancement" PhD Thesis

2023

T.K. Lam, S. Schamoni, S. Riezler "Make More of Your Data: Minimal Effort Data Augmentation for Automatic Speech Recognition and Translation" ICASSP 2023

2022

T.K. Lam, S. Schamoni, S. Riezler "Sample, Translate, Recombine: Leveraging Audio Alignments for Data Augmentation in End-to-end Speech Translation" ACL 2022

T.K. Lam, S. Schamoni, S. Riezler "Analyzing the Use of Influence Functions for Instance-Specific Data Filtering in Neural Machine Translation" WMT 2022

2021

T.K. Lam, M. Ohta, S. Schamoni, S. Riezler "On-the-Fly Aligned Data Augmentation for Sequence-to-Sequence ASR" Interspeech 2021

T.K. Lam, S. Schamoni, S. Riezler "Cascaded Models With Cyclic Feedback For Direct Speech Translation" ICASSP 2021

2019

T.K. Lam, S. Schamoni, S. Riezler "Interactive-predictive neural machine translation through reinforcement and imitation" MT Summit 2019

T.K. Lam, JGC de Souza, N. Ueffing "MT Quality Estimation for e-Commerce: Automatically Assessing the Quality of Machine Translation for Item Titles" Workshop at MT Summit 2019

2018

T.K. Lam, J. Kreutzer, S. Riezler "A reinforcement learning approach to interactive-predictive neural machine translation" EAMT 2018

Social Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tklam
GoogleScholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ii8kohwAAAAJ&hl=en