Brian Langner, Ph.D.
Education
Research
My primary research interests are in Speech Synthesis, Natural Language Generation, and Spoken Dialog (or Conversational) Systems. Specifically, my work has been in investigating methods of improving the quality of speech synthesis (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. These also lead towards general interests in Spoken Dialog to apply this work to interactive environments, as well as other areas of Computational Linguistics, Human-Computer Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence.
I previously worked on the Let's Go! project with my advisor, Dr. Alan W 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 annual Spoken Dialog Challenge. I was also part of the original DialRC group.
I have additionally worked with Alex Hauptmann and Florian Metze on multimedia event detection, which involves multimedia analysis of consumer-grade video to detect and describe videos that contain specific predefined events. I was part of the speech and audio group, focusing on acoustic scene analysis (automatic semantic transcription of non-speech acoustic information) and event recounting (automatic generation of natural language video descriptions and explanations of detection decisions).
Other reasons to be at this page
Publications and Invited Talks
- Langner, B. and Wulfeck, S. (2016) The Head and The Heart: How PullString Uses Science and Art to Build Conversational Entertainment, WOCCI 2016 Invited Talk, San Francisco, USA.
- Langner, B. (2013) From the Lab to the Living Room: The Challenges of Building Speech-Driven Applications for Children, ASRU 2013 Invited Talk, Olomouc, Czech Republic.
- Fandrianto, A., Langner, B., and Black, A. (2011) Using Speaker ID to Discover Repeat Callers to a Spoken Dialog System, Interspeech 2011, Florence, Italy. (pdf)
- Black, A., Burger, S., Langner, B., Parent, G., and Eskenazi, M. (2010) Spoken Dialog Challenge 2010, SLT 2010, Berkeley, USA. (pdf)
- Langner, B., Vogel, S., and Black, A. (2010) Evaluating a Dialog Language Generation System: Comparing the MOUNTAIN System to Other NLG Approaches, Interspeech 2010, Makuhari, Japan. (pdf)
- Best Student Paper Award Finalist
- Anumanchipalli, G., Muthukumar, P., Nallasamy, U., Parlikar, A., Black, A., and Langner, B. (2010) Improving Speech Synthesis for Noisy Environments, 7th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Kyoto, Japan. (pdf)
- 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)
