Christina Bennett

  Fourth year Ph.D. student
  Language Technologies Institute
  School of Computer Science
  Carnegie Mellon University
  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA

Research

Papers

Resume

Teaching & Service

Personal

Advisor:  Alan W Black
Member of the CMU Speech Group

Master of Science degree in Language Technologies (2003) - Carnegie Mellon University
Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and English (1997) - University of Texas


Research:

Speech synthesis evaluation:  For the past two years, we have hosted an international evaluation of corpus-based speech synthesis systems, the Blizzard Challenge.  Results from the inaugural Blizzard Challenge were presented as a special session at Interspeech 2005 - Eurospeech in Lisbon, Portugal.  The most recent Challenge results were presented at a satellite workshop of Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.  Further information, including results and papers from participating sites, can be found at:
   Blizzard Challenge 2005
   Blizzard Challenge 2006

Master's thesis topic:  "Personalization of synthetic voices by learning speaker-specific pronunciation habits" (Information available by request.)

From 1998 to 2002, I worked with Alex Rudnicky on the CMU Communicator project, a telephone-based spoken dialog system for travel planning. 


Publications:

Evaluation

Bennett, C. L. and Black, A. W., " The Blizzard Challenge 2006," Blizzard Challenge Workshop, Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP satellite event, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2006. (pdf)

Bennett, C. L., " Large Scale Evaluation of Corpus-based Synthesizers: Results and Lessons from the Blizzard Challenge 2005," in Proceedings of Interspeech 2005 - Eurospeech, Lisbon, Portugal, 2005. (pdf)

Speech Synthesis

Kominek, J., Bennett, C., Langner, B., and Toth, A., " The Blizzard Challenge 2005 CMU Entry, a method for improving speech synthesis systems," in Proceedings of Interspeech 2005 - Eurospeech, Lisbon, Portugal, 2005. (pdf)

Bennett, C. L. and Black, A. W., " Prediction of Pronunciation Variations for Speech Synthesis: A Data-driven Approach," in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2005. (pdf)

Bennett, C. L. and Black, A. W., " Using Acoustic Models to Choose Pronunciation Variations for Synthetic Voices, " in Proceedings of Eurospeech, Geneva, Switzerland, 2003. (pdf)

Kominek, J., Bennett, C. and Black, A. W., " Evaluating and Correcting Phoneme Segmentation for Unit Selection Synthesis, " in Proceedings of Eurospeech, Geneva, Switzerland, 2003. (pdf)

Dialog Systems

Bennett, C. and Rudnicky, A. I., " The Carnegie Mellon Communicator Corpus, " in Proceedings of the International Conference of Spoken Language Processing, Denver, Colorado, 2002. (pdf)

Bennett, C., Font Llitjos, A., Shriver, S., Rudnicky, A., and Black, A. W., "Building VoiceXML-Based Applications," in Proceedings of the International Conference of Spoken Language Processing, Denver, Colorado, 2002. (pdf)

Bennett, C., "A Comparative Analysis of DARPA Communicator Systems," Presentation at DARPA Communicator PI Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, July 2001.  (info available by request)

Rudnicky, A., Bennett, C., Black, A., Chotimongkol, A., Lenzo, K., Oh, A., Singh, R., "Task and Domain Specific Modelling in the Carnegie Mellon Communicator System," in Proceedings of the International Conference of Spoken Language Processing, Beijing, China, 2000. (pdf)

Eskenazi, M., Rudnicky, A., Gregory, K., Constantinides, P., Brennan, R., Bennett, C., Allen, J., "Data Collection and Processing in the Carnegie Mellon Communicator," in Proceedings of the Eurospeech Conference, Budapest, Hungary, 1999. (pdf)


Resume: HTML  or  text-only


Teaching and Service:

Fall 2006: TA for Grammars & Lexicons, taught by Lori Levin and Teruko Mitamura.  2006 course webpage

2001-2005: Actively involved with Women@SCS, an organization for women in computer science at CMU.

2003-2005: Founding member of the LTI Student Budget Committee, which organizes various events for students in the LTI. 

2003-2004: Organizer for SyRG (speech synthesis reading group).

Fall 2004: TA for Grammars & Lexicons, taught by Lori Levin and Teruko Mitamura.


Tina Bennett