Joris Driesen


2020

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Conversational Semantic Parsing for Dialog State Tracking
Jianpeng Cheng | Devang Agrawal | Héctor Martínez Alonso | Shruti Bhargava | Joris Driesen | Federico Flego | Dain Kaplan | Dimitri Kartsaklis | Lin Li | Dhivya Piraviperumal | Jason D. Williams | Hong Yu | Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha | Anders Johannsen
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We consider a new perspective on dialog state tracking (DST), the task of estimating a user’s goal through the course of a dialog. By formulating DST as a semantic parsing task over hierarchical representations, we can incorporate semantic compositionality, cross-domain knowledge sharing and co-reference. We present TreeDST, a dataset of 27k conversations annotated with tree-structured dialog states and system acts. We describe an encoder-decoder framework for DST with hierarchical representations, which leads to ~20% improvement over state-of-the-art DST approaches that operate on a flat meaning space of slot-value pairs.

2014

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The UEDIN ASR systems for the IWSLT 2014 evaluation
Peter Bell | Pawel Swietojanski | Joris Driesen | Mark Sinclair | Fergus McInnes | Steve Renals
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

This paper describes the University of Edinburgh (UEDIN) ASR systems for the 2014 IWSLT Evaluation. Notable features of the English system include deep neural network acoustic models in both tandem and hybrid configuration with the use of multi-level adaptive networks, LHUC adaptation and Maxout units. The German system includes lightly supervised training and a new method for dictionary generation. Our voice activity detection system now uses a semi-Markov model to incorporate a prior on utterance lengths. There are improvements of up to 30% relative WER on the tst2013 English test set.

2013

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Description of the UEDIN system for German ASR
Joris Driesen | Peter Bell | Mark Sinclair | Steve Renals
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

In this paper we describe the ASR system for German built at the University of Edinburgh (UEDIN) for the 2013 IWSLT evaluation campaign. For ASR, the major challenge to overcome, was to find suitable acoustic training data. Due to the lack of expertly transcribed acoustic speech data for German, acoustic model training had to be performed on publicly available data crawled from the internet. For evaluation, lack of a manual segmentation into utterances was handled in two different ways: by generating an automatic segmentation, and by treating entire input files as a single segment. Demonstrating the latter method is superior in the current task, we obtained a WER of 28.16% on the dev set and 36.21% on the test set.

2012

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Towards a Self-Learning Assistive Vocal Interface: Vocabulary and Grammar Learning
Janneke van de Loo | Jort F. Gemmeke | Guy De Pauw | Joris Driesen | Hugo Van hamme | Walter Daelemans
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Speech and Multimodal Interaction in Assistive Environments

2009

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A comparison and combination of segmental and fixed-frame signal representations in NMF-based word recognition
Okko Räsänen | Joris Driesen
Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2009)

2008

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Recording Speech of Children, Non-Natives and Elderly People for HLT Applications: the JASMIN-CGN Corpus.
Catia Cucchiarini | Joris Driesen | Hugo Van hamme | Eric Sanders
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

Within the framework of the Dutch-Flemish programme STEVIN, the JASMIN-CGN (Jongeren, Anderstaligen en Senioren in Mens-machine Interactie’ Corpus Gesproken Nederlands) project was carried out, which was aimed at collecting speech of children, non-natives and elderly people. The JASMIN-CGN project is an extension of the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN) along three dimensions. First, by collecting a corpus of contemporary Dutch as spoken by children of different age groups, elderly people and non-natives with different mother tongues, an extension along the age and mother tongue dimensions was achieved. In addition, we collected speech material in a communication setting that was not envisaged in the CGN: human-machine interaction. One third of the data was collected in Flanders and two thirds in the Netherlands. In this paper we report on our experiences in collecting this corpus and we describe some of the important decisions that we made in the attempt to combine efficiency and high quality.