Prof Sebastian Möller Seminar

Date: Friday 5th April 2019, 11am - 12noon
Venue: Room 221, BD Building, 4 Research Park Drive, Macquarie University
Speaker: Professor Sebastian Möller, Quality and Usability Lab, TU Berlin, and German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI
Host: Professor Mark Johnson
Topic: Quality Engineering of Speech and Language Services

Abstract
Speech- and language-based services have reached a high popularity, reaching an increasing group of users. In order to guarantee high acceptance on the long run, the quality and user experience has to be considered in the service development cycle in a systematic  way. The term “quality engineering” has been used as an umbrella term for such systematic approaches. In the talk, such approaches will be illustrated for two exemplary services. The first one is a spoken dialogue service where (synthetic) speech production,  dialogue management, and speech perception need to be considered from a human quality point-of-view. Instrumental prediction of text-to-speech quality, dialogue simulation, as well as instrumental recognition of speech and speaker characteristics are building  blocks to ensure high quality experience. The second service is a language translation service, in which automatic as well as human intelligence is combined in order to reach best possible outcome. Here, crowdsourcing approaches are used to translate and evaluate  language data. For each of the two services, experimental data is presented which illustrates the state-of-the-art performance, but also open research questions which need to be answered to improve quality and user experience.

Bio
Professor Möller is a world-renowned expert in speech signal processing, speech technology, communication acoustics, as well as on speech communication quality.  He is Dean for Research for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at TU Berlin. He also leads the research department "Language Technology" at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI.