Modeling and Facilitating Human Communication

  • Alex Waibel | Carnegie Mellon University

At the Interactive Systems Laboratories, our efforts have centered on human communications and on how computer systems can mediate or facilitate human communication. We have recently launched the “international Center for Advanced Communication Technologies” or “interACT”. It’s educational mission is to facilitate exchanges and opportunities for students to do scientific work in international teams, while carrying out research on advanced communication technologies that facilitate and improve human cross-cultural collaboration.

Two specific concentrations for our scientific work, are 1) perceptually aware computer interfaces and 2) speech-to-speech translation systems. As an instance of the former, I will introduce a new program, called CHIL (Computer in the Human Interaction Loop) which attempts to provide better services based on a more complete understanding of human activity and human communication cues (the Who? What? Where? How?). These are currently studied in meeting and lecture rooms. For the latter, I will present recent work in the area of speech translation. After a decade of effort on spontaneous, but domain-limited speech translation systems, we are now beginning work on the ultimate speech translator: domain-independent, spontaneous speech translation (as needed to realize simultaneous translation of lectures, telephone and meeting conversations). To achieve this goal, we require reliable conversational speech recognition and robust domain-unlimited machine translation. But for practical deployment of resulting systems we must also be concerned with 1) portability to new languages, 2) the trade-offs between Interlingua and direct approaches, 3.) new words and named entities and 4.) better learning strategies to grow and improve systems autonomously in field situations or for specialty topics.

Speaker Details

Alex Waibel is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany). He directs InterACT, the international Center for Advanced Communication Technologies at both Universities with research emphasis in speech recognition, language processing, speech translation, multimodal and perceptual user interfaces. At Carnegie Mellon, he also serves as Associate Director of the Language Technologies Institute and holds joint appointments in the Human Computer Interaction Institute and the Computer Science Department.Dr. Waibel was one of the founders of C-STAR, the international consortium for speech translation research and served as its chairman from 1998-2000. His team has developed the JANUS speech translation system, the JANUS speech recognition toolkit, and a number of multimodal systems including the meeting room, the Meeting recognizer and meeting browser.Dr. Waibel received the B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980 and 1986. His work on the Time Delay Neural Networks was awarded the IEEE best paper award in 1990; his work on multilingual and speech translation systems the “Alcatel SEL Research Prize for Technical Communication” in 1994, the “Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence” from CMU in 2002 and the Speech Communication Best Paper Award in 2002.

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