Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
(CS 528)
Collecting, err, Correcting Speech Errors
Mark Johnson, Brown University
November 15, 2004, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract
Disfluencies and errors abound in certain types of spontaneous speech,
and cause problems for the computer speech applications such as speech
recognition and question answering. This talk focuses on restarts and
speech repairs, such as /you get, uh, you can get a system for $10,/
because these are particularly disruptive to our natural language
parsing system. After explaining why these are so disruptive, we
propose a noisy-channel model architecture for detecting and correcting
speech transcripts which contain these kinds of errors. The channel
model uses a novel Tree Adjoining Grammar model to describe the crossing
dependencies that characterize these kinds of speech errors. By
embedding these components in a machine-learning reranking framework we
can adapt the model to new domains and further improve its performance.
Joint work with Eugene Charniak and Matt Lease.
About the Speaker
Mark Johnson received his PhD from the Stanford Linguistics department
in 1987, was a Post-doc at MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences
department, and became an Assistant Professor at Brown in 1988, where he
has been on the faculty ever since. He has had sabbaticals and leaves
of absence in lots of interesting places, the last of which was last
year, when he was a visiting scientist at MIT's Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His primary research area is
Computational Linguistics, and he's especially interested in developing
machine learning and statistical techniques to model the hidden
compositional structures involved in natural language. He was President
of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2003.
Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
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