
Maxine Eskenazi www.cs.cmu.edu/~max
Principal
Systems Scientist Tel. 412 268-3858
Language
Technologies Institute Fax
412 268-6298
Carnegie Mellon University first three letters of my first name at three initials of the University
6413 Gates Hillman Complex dot edu
!!! Now available!!! Eskenazi, M., Levow, G., Meng, H., Parent, G., Suendermann, D., 2013, Crowdsourcing for Speech Processing, Wiley.
I am past
chair of the SLaTE special interest group
(Speech and Language Technology for Education) of
ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) from 2006 to 2011. I am
Director of the Dialog Research Center. And
this year, 2013, I am co-chair of SIGDIAL’13.
GOALS INTERESTS
PROJECTS STUDENTS PUBLICATIONS TEACHING
RESOURCES
Understanding the variability of the speech
signal. Creating automatic systems (using spoken dialogue architectures,
automatic speech recognition and synthesis) that benefit from this knowledge
and that in turn provide a real benefit to end users. This endeavor implies
studying groups of speakers, input conditions, styles of speech and detecting
the acoustic and upper-level indices that are indicative of these variants. End
benefits may include language learning and information giving and gathering.
I am interested in the variability of the speech signal – relating its
sources to its manifestations, characterizing groups of speakers, grouping observable
phenomena. Non-native speech is a specific interest within this area, as is
speaking style.
Spoken dialogue systems are one of
my areas of interest. I am less interested in play systems than systems that
have real users and serve a real purpose, such as Let’s Go. The Let’s Go system
has been answering the phone for the Port Authority of Allegheny County every
evening since the beginning of March
I am also interested in how to teach foreign languages effectively,
both by a human and by a computer. This includes curriculum creation and
navigation, interface issues and issues leading to robust learning. Culture
underlies all language and so is also an interest of mine. And of course I am
interested in pinpointing errors in non-native speech (patented!) and then
providing appropriate corrective feedback.
The system I created to detect and correct foreign speakers’
pronunciation errors in English was called Fluency and the basic algorithms
developed in that project were spun off into the NativeAccentTM
product sold by the company I started, Carnegie SpeechTM. Another
use of research results in use in real life! And the REAP system is also
getting into the hands of many students and teachers.
I am
the past chair of the ISCA special interest group on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE). Please visit our website for more information (www.sigslate.org).
Fluency – a project to use automatic speech
recognition to detect pronunciation errors and to provide appropriate correction
information – contact me directly for more information.
Let’s Go – a project using a spoken
dialogue system to expand access to such systems to the elderly and to
non-native speakers. http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/letsgo/
DialRC – a Center that is at the service of
the Spoken Dialog community, providing data, running studies, educating and
running a Spoken Dialog Challenge http://dialrc.org/
LexE – a project on lexical entrainment on
both sides of the dialog with spoken dialog systems, sometimes with non-native
speakers
REAP – a project to retrieve appropriate,
individuated texts for students learning to read http://reap.cs.cmu.edu/ which exists in French and Portuguese as
well as in English.
Present:
Jose
David Aguas Lopes, Rui Correira, Andrew Fandrianto,
Postdocs: Oscar Saz,
Sungjin Lee
Past: Adam Skory, Kevin Dela Rosa, Gabriel Parent, Antoine Raux, Jonathan Brown, Jie Hu, Juan Pino, Michael Heilman, Aleata Hubbard, Elizabeth Harris, Kathrin Probst, Yan Ke, Helene Maynard-Bonneau, Paul-Eric Stern, Anne Lacheret-Dujour, Yibin Lin
Spoken
Dialogue Systems and Automatic Speech Recognition
Sungjin Lee, Maxine Eskenazi,
2012, Incremental Sparse Bayesian Method for Online Dialog
Strategy Learning. J. Sel. Topics
Signal Processing 6(8): 903-916.
Sungjin Lee, Maxine Eskenazi:
An Unsupervised Approach to User Simulation: Toward
Self-Improving Dialog Systems. SIGDIAL Conference
2012: 50-59.
Sungjin Lee, Maxine Eskenazi:
Exploiting Machine-Transcribed Dialog Corpus to Improve
Multiple Dialog States Tracking Methods. SIGDIAL Conference
2012: 189-196.
Sungjin Lee, Maxine Eskenazi:
POMDP-based Let's Go system for spoken dialog challenge.
SLT 2012:
61-66.
Andrew Fandrianto, Maxine Eskenazi, 2012,
Prosodic Entrainment in an
Information-Driven Dialog System, Proceedings of Interspeech2012,
José Lopes, Andrew Fandrianto, Maxine
Eskenazi, Isabel Trancoso, 2012, Can a spoken dialog system be used as
a tool for convergence?, International Symposium on Imitation and
Convergence in Speech,
Parent, G., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Speaking to the Crowd: looking at past achievements in using crowdsourcing for speech and predicting future challenges, Proceedings Interspeech 2011, special session on crowdsourcing, Florence Italy. pdf file
Parent, G., Eskenazi, M. 2010. Toward better crowdsourced
transcription: Transcription of a year of the let’s go bus information system
data. In Proc SLT, Berkeley, CA. pdf file
Parent, G., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Sources of variability and
adaptive tasks, Proceedings CHI2011. pdf file
Alan W Black, Susanne Burger, Alistair Conkie, Helen Hastie,
Simon Keizer, Oliver Lemon, Nicolas Merigaud, Gabriel Parent, Gabriel
Schubiner, Blaise Thomson, Jason D. Williams, Kai Yu, Steve Young and Maxine
Eskenazi, Spoken Dialog Challenge 2010: Comparison of Live and Control Test
Results, Proc. SIGDIAL2011, Portland, OR. .pdf file
Eskenazi, M., Black, A., 2010, SDC: The Spoken Dialog
Challenge, invited short presentation at SIGDIAL 2010. Slides
Parent, G. and Eskenazi, M. 2010. Lexical Entrainment of
Real Users in the Let's Go Spoken Dialog System. In Proceedings of ISCA
Interspeech 2010,
Black, A., and Eskenazi, M., "The Spoken Dialogue Challenge" SIGDIAL 2009,
Gonzalez-Brenes, J., Black, A., and Eskenazi, M. "Describing Spoken Dialogue Systems
Differences" IWSDS 2009,
Raux, A., Langner, B., Black, A. and Eskenazi, M. Building Practical Spoken Dialog Systems
ACL/HLT 2008 Tutorial,
Eskenazi, M., Black, A., Raux, A. and Langner, B., 2008, Let's Go Lab: a platform for evaluation of spoken
dialog systems with real world users, Interspeech 2008,
A. Raux and M. Eskenazi, 2008, Optimizing Endpointing
Thresholds using Dialogue Features in a Spoken Dialogue System, SIGdial 2008,
Columbus, OH, USA. pdf
file
A. Raux and M. Eskenazi, A Multi-Layer Architecture for
Semi-Synchronous Event-Driven Dialogue Management, ASRU 2007,
Ai, H., Raux, A., Bohus, D., Exkenazi, M., and Litman, D.,
2007, Comparing Spoken Dialog Corpora
Collected with Recruited Subjects versus Real Users, 8th SIGDial Workshop on
Discourse and Dialogue, Antwerp, Belgium. pdf file
D. Bohus, A. Raux, T. Harris, M. Eskenazi, and A. Rudnicky,
2007, Olympus: an open-source framework for conversational spoken language
interface research, HLT-NAACL 2007 workshop on Bridging the Gap: Academic and
Industrial Research in Dialog Technology,
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, Proc. Interspeech 2006,
A. Raux, B. Langner, D. Bohus, A. W Black and M. Eskenazi,
Let's Go Public! Taking a Spoken Dialog System to the Real World, Interspeech
2005
Eskenazi, M., 1998, User Come Back, DARPA Communicator
Compare and Contrast Meeting, June 16-17, 1998. .pdf file
Ravishankar, M. and Eskenazi, M., 1997,
Automatic Generation of Context-dependent Pronunciations, Proc. Eurospeech ’97,
Placeway, P., Chen, S., Eskenazi, M.,
Jain, U., Parikh, V., Raj, B., Ravishankar, M., Rosenfeld, R., Seymore, K.,
Siegler, M., Stern, R., Thayer, E., 1997, The 1996 HUB-4 Sphinx-3 System, Proc,
DARPA Speech Recognition Workshop, Chantilly, Virginia, Morgan Kaufmann
Publishers.
Seymore, K., Chen, S., Eskenazi, M.,
Rosenfeld, R., (1997), Language and Pronunciation Modelling in the CMU 1996
HUB-4 Evaluation, Proc, DARPA Speech Recognition Workshop, Chantilly, Virginia,
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
Computer-Assisted
Language Learning
Eskenazi,
M., 2009, An overview of spoken language technology for education, Speech
Communication, Elsevier, vol 51 issue 10 p. 832-844.
Vocabulary Learning
Rui Correia, Jorge
Baptista, Maxine Eskenazi, Nuno J. Mamede, Maxine Eskenazi, Automatic
Generation of Cloze Question Stems, In International Conference on
Computational Processing of Portuguese (Propor 2012), Springer-Verlag, vol.
7243, series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 168–178, Coimbra,
Portugal, April 2012.
José Lopes, Isabel
Trancoso, Rui Correia, Thomas Pellegrini, Hugo Meinedo, Nuno J. Mamede, Maxine
Eskenazi, Multimedia Learning Materials, In IEEE Spoken Language
Technology Workshop, IEEE, Berkeley, USA, December 2010.
Rui Correia, Jorge
Baptista, Nuno J. Mamede, Isabel Trancoso, Maxine Eskenazi, Automatic
Generation of Cloze Question Distractors, In Second Language
Studies: Acquisition, Learning, Education and Technology, SLaTE: the ISCA SIG
on Speech and Language Technology in Edu,
Dela Rosa, K., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Effect of Word
Complexity on L2 Vocabulary Learning, Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of
the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies's
6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
(ACL-HLT: BEA 2011). 2011. pdf file
Dela Rosa, K., Eskenazi, M., 2011,
Self-Assessment of Motivation: Explicit and Implicit Indicators in L2
Vocabulary Learning, Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2011). pdf file
Dela Rosa, K., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Impact of
Word Sense Disambiguation on Ordering Dictionary Definitions in Vocabulary
Learning Tutors, Proceedings of the 24th International FLAIRS Conference
(FLAIRS 2011). pdf
file
Skory, A., Eskenazi, M., 2011, Generation of Educational
Content through Gameplay, Proc. SLaTE2011,
M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, M. Eskenazi, A. Juffs, L.
Wilson. 2010. Personalization of Reading Passages Improves Vocabulary
Acquisition. International Journal of
Artificial Intelligence in Education, Vol. 20 (1).
Dela Rosa, K., Parent, G. ,Eskenazi, M., 2010, Multimodal learning of
words: A study on the use of speech synthesis to reinforce written text in L2
language learning, Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language
Technology in Education (SLaTE 2010) pdf file
Skory, A. and Eskenazi, M. (2010),
Predicting Cloze Quality for Vocabulary Training, Proc. of NAACL HLT Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building
Educational Applications,
Skory, A. and Eskenazi, M. (2010),
Automatic Selection of Collocations for Instruction, Proc. of SLaTE Workshop on Speech and Language
Technology in Education,
file
Data
collection and assessment
A
book chapter on the material in 11-717:
Here
is an informal course I teach on how to write a scientific paper.
Here
are some things that may be of interest to you.
1.
GRAPHEME_TO-PHONEME DICTIONARY: I am one of the people who has worked on CMUDICT a large
grapheme-to-phoneme dictionary containing over 130,000 entries. CMUDICT can be
used for a variety of applications and research topics. It is distributed as
open source software and can be found at: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict
2. NEW FINDINGS IN LANGUAGE
LEARNING:
One of the most promising directions that I know of for language learning is
the one that started with D. Pisoni, A. Bradlow (Northwestern) and R. Yamada
(ATR). They create pairs of sounds (R and L for Japanese learners of English)
and acoustically “pull them apart” until the student can hear the difference
between them. Students for whom this training works often can pronounce a new
sound without having pronunciation training on it.
3. FAUX AMIS: I compiled a list of words
that appear to be the same, but have very different meanings in French and
English. The list is available here and if you find other entries or would like
to suggest modifications or corrections, please download and let me know. I
will be glad to post your comments and make changes to the list for all to
use. .doc file Eventually I will add the
meanings!