Events Calendar

Machine Learning for Speech and Language Processing

Speaker: Professor Jen-Tzung Chien, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu

Talk Title: Machine Learning for Speech and Language Processing

Abstract: In this lecture, I will present a series of machine learning approaches to various applications relevant to speech and language processing including acoustic modelling, language modelling, blind source separation and document summarization. In general, speech and language processing involves extensive knowledge of statistical models which are learnt from observation data. However, in the real world, observation data are inevitably acquired from heterogeneous environments in the presence of mislabeled, misaligned, mismatched and ill-posed conditions. The estimated models suffer from large complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty. Model regularization becomes a crucial issue when constructing the speech and text models for different information systems. In statistical machine learning, the uncertainty and sparse coding algorithms provide attractive and effective solution to model regularization. This lecture will address recent works on Bayesian and sparse learning. In particular, I will present Bayesian sensing hidden Markov models and Dirichlet class language models for speech recognition, online Gaussian process for blind source separation, and Bayesian nonparametrics for document summarization. In these works, robust models are established against improper model assumption, over-determined model complexity, ambient noise interference, and nonstationary environment variations. Finally, I will point out some potential topics on machine learning for speech and language processing.

Biography: Jen-Tzung Chien received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 1997. During 1997-2012, he was with the National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. Since 2012, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor. He held the Visiting Researcher positions at the Panasonic Technologies Inc., Santa Barbara, CA, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, the Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, and the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. His research interests include machine learning, speech recognition and blind source separation.
Dr. Chien served as the associate editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, in 2008-2011, and the tutorial speaker of the ICASSP, in 2012. He is appointed as the APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer for 2012-2013. He was a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop in 2011. He received the Distinguished Research Awards from the National Science Council, Taiwan, in 2006 and 2010.

Host: Kartik Audhkhasi, Dr. Maarten Van Segbroeck, Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan

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

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mary Francis