Events Calendar

Integrating speech science and technology: New models for speech and audio processing

Speaker: Dr. Eric Fosler-Lussier, The Ohio State University

Talk Title: Integrating speech science and technology: New models for speech and audio processing

Abstract: Traditional speech recognition techniques adopt a hierarchical, top down approach to modeling speech data; linguistic information such as word pronunciations or language models typically act as priors in statistical models for automatic speech recognition (ASR). One line of research has started to integrate linguistic information within the representation of the underlying speech data. However, the top down approach typically used in ASR (Hidden Markov Models) does not easily allow for combining evidence from different linguistic representations.

Similarly, in speech separation (removing background noise from a speech-noise mixture), different cues have been identified that indicate speech or background noise. However, the techniques that have utilized multiple cues typically combine them in an ad hoc manner.

In this talk, I will discuss a line of research from my lab that looks at combining evidence using Conditional Random Fields: CRFs have been utilized within the NLP community for many tasks, but their use in the speech community is only starting to take off. Applications of CRFs to the ASR and speech separation problems show that this type of model can be an effective combiner of information, and can allow us to easily integrate ideas from speech science into working systems.


Biography: Eric Fosler-Lussier is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, with a courtesy appointment in Linguistics, at The Ohio State University. After receiving a B.A.S. (Computer and Cognitive Science) and B.A. (Linguistics) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, he received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of California, Berkeley, performing his dissertation research at the International Computer Science Institute under the tutelage of Prof. Nelson Morgan. He has also been a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and a Visiting Researcher at Columbia University. In 2006, Prof. Fosler-Lussier was awarded an NSF CAREER award, and in 2010 was presented with a Lumley Research Award by the Ohio State College of Engineering. He is also the recipient (with co-author Jeremy Morris) of the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award. He has published over 90 papers in speech and language processing, is a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the International Speech Communication Association, and a senior member of the IEEE.

Fosler-Lussier serves on the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2006-2008, 2010-2013), as well as on the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing and the Journal of Experimental Linguistics. He is generally interested in integrating linguistic insights as priors in statistical learning systems.


Host: Professor Shrikanth Narayanan

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mary Francis