Research Interests

• Voice Search: Getting information over the cellphone
• Speech Recognition Infrastructure: Trainers and Decoders
• Machine Learning Methods for Automatic Speech Recognition: Boosting, Bayesian Networks, Direct Models 
• Speech Analytics: Understanding the gist of conversations and statements

Background

I am a Senior Researcher in the speech group at Microsoft Research, which I joined in 2006. My research interests include applied and scientific areas. On the applied side, I am interested Voice Search and speech interfaces for mobile devices, especially for accessing business and product information. Bing Mobile data provides an ideal avenue for this work. On the scientific side, I am interested in improved algorithms for acoustic modeling and decoding, phonetic decoding, and multi-lingual robustness.

Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked at IBM Research for eight years, again focusing on speech research, and most recently working on English, Arabic and Mandarin speech recognition systems for the DARPA EARS (Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-Text) and GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) programs.

I received my PhD in 1998 from the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley where I was advised by Stuart Russell and Nelson Morgan. I have served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language and am currently on the editorial board of Computer Speech and Language. I am a member of the ACM, senior member of the IEEE and on the affiliate faculty of the University of Washington Electrical Engineering Department.

Publications

• G. Zweig and P. Nguyen. A Segmental CRF Approach to Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition In Proceedings of ASRU. 2009.
• G. Zweig and P. Nguyen. Maximum Mutual Information Multi-phone Units in Direct Modeling In Proceedings of Interspeech. 2009.
• G. Zweig. New Methods for the Analysis of Repeated Utterances
• G. Heigold, G. Zweig, X. Li and P. Nguyen. A Flat Direct Model for Speech Recognition. In Proceedings of ICASSP. 2009.
• D. Bolanos, G. Zweig and P. Nguyen. Multi-Scale Personalization for Voice Search Applications. In Proceedings of HLT-NAACL. 2009.
• G. Zweig, D. Bohus, X. Li and P. Nguyen. Structured Models for Joint Decoding of Repeated Utterances. In Proceedings of Interspeech. 2008.
• D. Bohus, X. Li, P. Nguyen and G. Zweig. Learning N-Best Correction Models from Implicit User Feedback in a Multi-Modal Local Search Application. In Proceedings of SIGdial. 2008.
• Z. Li, P. Nguyen and G. Zweig. Optimal Dialog in Consumer-Rating Systems using a POMDP Framework. In Proceedings of SIGdial. 2008.
• G. Zweig and J. Nedel. Empirical Properties of Multilingual Phone-to-Word Transduction. In Proceedings of ICASSP. 2008.
• C. White, G. Zweig, L. Burget, P. Schwarz, H. Hermansky. Confidence Estimation, OOV Detection and Language ID Using Phone-to-Word Transduction and Phone-Level Alignments. In Proceedings of ICASSP. 2008.
• G. Choueiter, G. Zweig and P. Nguyen. An Empirical Study of Automatic Accent Classification. In Proceedings of ICASSP. 2008.
• A. Acero, N. Bernstein, R. Chambers, Y. C. Ju, X. Li, J. Odell, P. Nguyen, O. Scholz and G. Zweig. Live Search for Mobile: Web Services by Voice on the Cellphone. In Proceedings of ICASSP. 2008.
• X. Li, Y. C. Ju, G. Zweig and A. Acero. Language Modeling for Voice Search: A Machine Translation Approach. In Proceedings of ICASSP. 2008.
• G. Zweig, P. Nguyen, Y. C. Ju, Ye-Yi Wang, D. Yu and A. Acero. The Voice-Rate Dialog System for Consumer Ratings. In Proceedings of Interspeech. 2007.
• D. Yu, Y. C. Ju, Ye-Yi Wang, G. Zweig and A. Acero. Automated Directory Assistance System - From Theory to Practice. In Proceedings of Interspeech. 2007.
• H. Kuo, G. Zweig, and B. Kingsbury. Discriminative Training of Decoding Graphs for Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition. In Proceedings of ICASSP. 2007.
• H. Soltau, G. Saon, D. Povey, L. Mangu, J. Kuo, M. Omar and G. Zweig. The IBM 2006 GALE Arabic ASR System. In Proceedings of ICASSP. 2007.
• G. Zweig, O. Siohan, B. Ramabhadran, D. Povey, L. Mangu and B. Kingsbury. Automated Quality Monitoring in the Call Center with ASR and Maximum Entropy. In Proceedings of ICASSP . 2006.
• G. Choueiter, D. Povey, S. Chen, and G. Zweig. Morpheme Based Language Modeling for Arabic LVCSR. In Proceedings of ICASSP . 2006.
• S. Chen, B. Kingsbury, L. Mangu, D. Povey, G. Saon, H. Soltau and G. Zweig. Advances in Speech Transcription at IBM under the DARPA EARS Program. In IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. Vol. 14, No. 5. 2006
• B. Ramabhadran, O. Siohan, L. Mangu, G. Zweig, M. Westphal, H. Schulz and A. Soneiro. The IBM 2006 Speech Transcription System for European Parliamentary Speeches. In Proceedings of ICSLP 2006. 2006.
• Y. Qin, Q. Shi, Y.Y. Liu, H. Aronowitz, S. Chu, H. Kuo and G. Zweig. Advances in Mandarin Broadcast Speech Transcription at IBM under the GALE Program. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science . Springer Verlag v. 4274, pp. 410-421. 2006.
• H. Soltau, B. Kingsbury, L. Mangu, D. Povey, G. Saon and G. Zweig. The IBM 2004 Conversational Telephony System for Rich Transcription . In Proceedings of ICASSP 2005.
• D. Povey, B. Kingsbury, L. Mangu, G. Saon, H. Soltau and G. Zweig. FMPE: Discriminatively Trained Features for Speech Recognition. In Proceedings of ICASSP 2005.
• G. Saon, G. Zweig and D. Povey. Anatomy of an Extremely Fast LVCSR Decoder. In Proceedings of Interspeech. 2005.
• O. Siohan, B. Ramabhadran, G. Zweig. Speech Recognition Error Analysis on the English MALACH Corpus. In Proceedings of ICSLP. 2004.
• B. Ramabhadran, G. Zweig, O. Siohan. Use of metadata to improve recognition of spontaneous speech and named entities. In Proceedings of ICSLP. 2004.
• F. Yvon, G. Zweig and G. Saon. Arc Minimization in Finite State Decoding Graphs with Cross-Word Decoding Context. In Computer Speech and Language. Vol. 18, 2004.
• G. Zweig and M. Picheny. Advances in Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition. In Advances in Computers, Elsevier Science. 2004.
• G. Zweig. Bayesian Network Structures and Inference Techniques for Automatic Speech Recognition. In Computer Speech and Language 2003.
• G. Saon, G. Zweig, B. Kingsbury, L. Mangu and U. Chaudhari. An Architecture for Rapid Decoding of Large Vocabulary Conversational Speech. In Proceedings of Eurospeech. 2003.
• EE Jan, B. Maison, L. Mangu and G. Zweig. Automatic construction of Unique Signatures and Confusable sets for Natural Language Directory Assistance Application. In Proceedings of Eurospeech. 2003.
• B. Kingsbury, L. Mangu, G. Saon, G. Zweig, S. Axelrod, V. Goel, K. Visweswariah, and M. Picheny. Toward Domain-Independent Conversational Speech Recognition. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003.
• G. Zweig, G. Saon, and F. Yvon. Arc Minimization in Finite State Decoding Graphs with Cross-Word Decoding Context. In Proceedings of ICSLP 2002.
• J. Huang, G. Zweig, and M. Padmanabhan. Information Extraction from Voicemail. In Proceedings of ACL 2002.
• J. Huang and G. Zweig. Maximum Entropy Modeling for Punctuation from Speech. In Proceedings of ICSLP 2002.
• G. Zweig, J. Bilmes, et al. Structurally Discriminative Graphical Models for Automatic Speech Recognition: Results from the 2001 Johns Hopkins Summer Workshop. In Proceedings of ICASSP 2002.
• J. Bilmes and G. Zweig. The Graphical Models Toolkit: An Open Source Software System for Speech and Time Series Processing. In Proceedings of ICASSP 2002.
• G. Zweig. Bayesian Network Structures and Inference Techniques for Automatic Speech Recognition. Unpublished Tutorial, 2001.
• G. Zweig. Hidden Variable Structures for Training and Decoding with Graphical Models in ASR. Johns Hopkins Workshop Presentation, 2001.
• G. Saon, G. Zweig, and M Padmanabhan. Linear Feature Space Transformations for Speaker Adaptation. In Proceedings of ICASSP 2001.
• G. Zweig, J. Huang, and M. Padmanabhan. Extracting Caller Information from Voicemail. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2001.
• M. Padmanabhan, G. Saon, G. Zweig, J. Huang, B. Kingsbury, L. Mangu. Evolution of the Performance of Automatic Speech Recognition Algorithms in Transcribing Conversational Telephone Speech. In Proceedings of IMTC 2001.
• G. Zweig and M. Padmanabhan. Exact Alpha-Beta Computation in Logarithmic Space with Application to MAP Word Graph Construction. In Proceedings of ICSLP 2000.
• G. Zweig and M. Padmanabhan. Boosting Gaussian Mixtures in an LVCSR System. In Proceedings of ICASSP 2000.
• M. Padmanabhan, G. Saon, and G. Zweig. Lattice-Based Unsupervised MLLR for Speaker Adaptation. In Proceedings of ASR 2000.
• J. Huang, B. Kingsbury, L. Mangu, M. Padmanabhan, G. Saon, and G. Zweig. Recent Improvements in Speech Recognition Performance on Large Vocabulary Conversational Speech (Voicemail and Switchboard). In Proceedings of ICSLP 2000.
• Geoffrey Zweig and Mukund Padmanabhan. Dependency Modeling with Bayesian Networks in a Voicemail Transcription System. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 1999.
• M. Padmanabhan, G. Saon, S. Basu, J. Huang, G. Zweig. Recent improvements on a VoiceMail transcription Task. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 1999.
• G. Zweig and S. Russell. Probabilistic Modeling with Bayesian Networks for Automatic Speech Recognition. In Australian Journal of Intelligent Information Processing. 1999.
• G. Zweig. Speech Recognition with Dynamic Bayesian Networks. PhD Thesis University of California at Berkeley. 1998.
• G. Zweig, S. Russell. Speech Recognition with Dynamic Bayesian Networks. In Proceedings of AAAI 1998.
• G. Zweig and S. Russell. Probabilistic Modeling with Bayesian Networks for ASR. In Proceddings of ICSLP 1998.
• A. Broder, S. Glassman, M. Manasse and G. Zweig. Syntactic Clustering of the Web. In Proceedings of WWW6 and Computer Networks 29 (8-13) and Digital/HP Technical Report SRC-TN-1997-015 1997. Best Paper Award at WWW6.
• R. Karp, O. Waarts, G. Zweig. The Bit Vector Intersection Problem. In Foundations of Computer Science 1995.
• F. Alizadeh, R. Karp, D. Weisser, G. Zweig. Physical Mapping of Chromosomes Using Unique Probes. In Symposium on Discrete Algorithms 1994.
• G. Zweig. An Effective Tour Construction and Improvement Procedure for the Traveling Salesman Problem. Operations Research , v. 43, n. 6. 1995.

Patents

I am an inventor of several patents, including:

• U.S. Patent #6,842,796: Information Extraction from Documents with Regular Expression Matching (2005), with M. Padmanabhan.
• U.S. Patent #6,611,678: Device and Method for Trainable Radio Scanning (2003), with C. Neti.
• U.S. Patent #6,411,933: Methods and Apparatus for Correlating Biometric Attributes and Biometric Attribute Production Features (2002), with S. Maes.
• U.S. Patent #6,119,124: Method for Clustering Closely Resembling Data Objects (2000), with A. Broder, S. Glassman, M. Manasse, and G. Nelson.

Contact

E-mail: Geoffrey Zweig
U.S.Mail: Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA, 98052-6399, USA
Tel: (425) 421-6668
Fax: (425) 936-7329 (This is the main MS FAX number so make sure to send documents to my attention)

Contents

• Research Interests
• Background
• Publications
• Patents
• Contact