Speech Researchers Receive Best Paper Award at ASRU


Steven Wegmann receiving best paper award at ASRU 2013

January 31, 2014
Speech Research Director Steven Wegmann and his colleagues received a best paper award at the Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) in December in Olomouc, Czech Republic. Their paper, “The Tao of ATWV: Probing the Mysteries of Keyword Search Performance,” describes the keyword search system they’ve developed for conversational telephone speech. The work was done for their project under the IARPA Babel program, which funds teams to build keyword search systems under time constraints and using small amounts of transcribed audio as training data. The paper also described the diagnostic analysis the researchers designed and applied to the system.

Also at ASRU, ICSI Director Nelson Morgan and Speech alum Brian Kingsbury, now at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, organized the opening day, which focused on neural networks in automatic speech recognition. Morgan also gave an invited talk, “Multilayer Perceptrons for Speech Recognition: There and Back Again.” Wegmann and Jordan Cohen, a long-time collaborator, gave the keynote talk on the final day of the workshop on Project OUCH - Outing Unfortunate Characteristics of HMMs (Used for Speech Recognition).

Related Paper: “The Tao of ATWV: Probing the Mysteries of Keyword Search Performance,”S. Wegmann, A. Faria, A. Janin, K. Riedhammer, and N. Morgan, Proceedings of the Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2013), Olomouc, Czech Republic, December 2013.

Related Projects:

Spoken WOrdsearch  with Rapid Development and Frugal Invariant Subword Hierarchies (Swordfish)

OUCH - Outing Unfortunate Characteristics of HMMs (Used for Speech Recognition)