Lab Tutorial: Towards Open-domain Spoken Dialogue Systems

Virtually all current spoken dialogue systems are designed to operate in either a specific carefully defined domain such as restaurant information and appointment booking, or they have very limited conversational ability such as in Siri and Google Now. However, if voice is to become a significant input modality for accessing web-based information and services, then techniques will be needed to enable conversational spoken dialogue systems to operate within open domains. This talk will discuss methods by which current statistical approaches to spoken dialogue can be extended to cover much wider domains. In contrast to traditional rule-based approaches to building spoken dialogue systems (SDS), recent research has shown that it is possible to implement all of the required functionality using statistical models trained using a combination of supervised learning and reinforcement learning.

Speaker Details

Steve Young received a BA in Electrical Sciences from Cambridge University in 1973 and a PhD in Speech Processing in 1978. He held lectureships at both Manchester and Cambridge Universities before being elected to the Chair of Information Engineering at Cambridge University in 1994. He was a co-founder and Technical Director of Entropic Ltd from 1995 until 1999 when the company was taken over by Microsoft. After a short period as an Architect at Microsoft, he returned full-time to the University in January 2001 where he is now Professor of Information Engineering.His research interests include speech recognition, language modelling, spoken dialogue and multi-media applications. He is the inventor and original author of the HTK Toolkit for building hidden Markov model- based recognition systems (see http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk), and with Phil Woodland, he developed the HTK large vocabulary speech recognition system which has figured strongly in DARPA/NIST evaluations since it was first introduced in the early nineties. More recently he has developed statistical dialogue systems and pioneered the use of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for modelling them. He also has active research in voice transformation, emotion generation and HMM synthesis.He has written and edited books on software engineering and speech processing, and he has published as author and co-author, more than 200 papers in these areas. He is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Royal Society of Arts. He served as the senior editor of Computer Speech and Language from 1993 to 2004 and is now a member of the editorial board. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Chair of the Speech and Language Technical Committee. He has also served on the technical committees of numerous workshops and conferences. He was the recipient of an IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2004 and he was made a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association in 2008.

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Speakers:
Steve Young
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