Brian Langner
Education
Current Research
I have worked on the Let's Go! project with my advisor, Dr. Alan Black. This project involved building a spoken dialog system for bus information that can be readily used by non-native English speakers and the elderly, as well as the general population. Let's Go! and the underlying Olympus spoken dialog framework are now being used as a platform for the Dialog Research Center and the proposed annual Spoken Dialog Challenge.
My current research interests are in natural language generation and speech synthesis. Specifically, my work has been in investigating methods of improving the quality of speech synthesis and (and spoken language generation) so that it is clear and natural enough to be easily understood by users of speech systems – including populations that typically have difficulty understanding synthesized speech. This includes work on stylistic changes in spoken output as well as exploring improvements in presenting complex information using speech. Recent work has been in data-driven approaches to natural language generation, as well as investigating what makes spoken output understandable, and how to apply that to language generation for synthetic speech.
For other information, you can look at my cv.
Other reasons to be at this page
Publications
- Langner, B. and Black, A. (2009) MOUNTAIN: A Translation-based Approach to Natural Language Generation for Dialog Systems, IWSDS 2009, Irsee, Germany. (pdf)
- Black, A., Anumanchipalli, G., Kominek, J., Langner, B., Nallasamy, U., Prahallad, K., Qin, L., and Toth, A. (2009) CMU Blizzard 2009: A statistical parametric synthesis approach, Blizzard Challenge 2009, Edinburgh, UK. (pdf)
- Black, A., Bennett, C., Kominek, J., Langner, B., Prahallad, K., Toth, A. (2008) CMU Blizzard 2008: Optimally using a large database for unit selection synthesis, Blizzard Challenge 2008, Brisbane, Australia. (pdf)
- Raux, A., Langner, B., Black, A. and Eskenazi, M. (2008) Building Practical Spoken Dialog Systems ACL/HLT 2008 Tutorial, Columbus, Ohio.
- Langner, B., Black, A. (2007) uGloss: A Framework for Improving Spoken Language Generation Understandability, Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium. (pdf)
- Black, A., Bennett, C., Blanchard, B., Kominek, J., Langner, B., Prahallad, K., Toth, A. (2007) CMU Blizzard 2007: A Hybrid Acoustic Unit Selection System from Statistically Predicted Parameters, Blizzard Challenge 2007, Bonn, Germany. (pdf)
- Langner, B., Black, A. (2007) Understandable Production of Massive Synthesis, 6th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Bonn, Germany. (pdf)
- Bohus, D., Langner, B., Raux, A., Black, A., Eskenazi, M., Rudnicky, A. (2006) Online Supervised Learning of Non-understanding Recovery Policies, SLT 2006, Aruba, Aruba. (pdf)
- Langner, B., Kumar, R., Chan, A., Gu, L., Black, A. (2006) Generating Time-Constrained Audio Presentations of Structured Information, Interspeech 2006, Pittsburgh, USA. (pdf)
- Raux, A., Bohus, D., Langner, B., Black, A., Eskenazi, M. (2006) Doing Research on a Deployed Spoken Dialogue System: One Year of Let's Go! Experience, Interspeech 2006, Pittsburgh, USA. (pdf)
- Langner, B., Black, A. (2005) Using Speech In Noise to Improve Understandability for Elderly Listeners, ASRU 2005, San Juan, Puerto Rico. (pdf)
- Kominek, J., Bennett, C., Langner, B., Toth, A. (2005) The Blizzard Challenge 2005 CMU Entry: A Method For Improving Speech Synthesis Systems, Interspeech 2005 (Eurospeech), Lisbon, Portugal. (pdf)
- Raux, A., Langner, B., Black, A., Eskenazi, M. (2005) Let's Go Public! Taking a Spoken Dialog System to the Real World, Interspeech 2005 (Eurospeech), Lisbon, Portugal. (pdf)
- Langner, B., Black, A. (2005) Improving the Understandability of Speech Synthesis by Modeling Speech In Noise, ICASSP 2005, Philadelphia, USA. (pdf)
- Langner, B., Black, A. (2004) An Examination of Speech In Noise and its Effect on Understandability for Natural and Synthetic Speech, Carnegie Mellon University, Language Technologies Institute, Technical Report CMU-LTI-04-187. (pdf)
- Langner, B., Black, A. (2004) Creating a Database of Speech In Noise For Unit Selection Synthesis, 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, USA. (pdf)
- Raux, A., Langner, B., Black, A., Eskenazi, M. (2003) LET'S GO: Improving Spoken Dialog Systems for the Elderly and Non-Natives, Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland. (pdf, ps)
