Research

My doctoral research was on feature selection for spoken dialogue systems.

Spoken dialogue between people and machines is increasingly common, but not as flexible and complex as that between people. Spoken dialogue is susceptible to error – human speech is often loosely structured, people change their mind at mid- sentence, repeat themselves, pause, and produce non-speech sounds. A spoken dialogue system expected to handle complex and flexible dialogue like that between people must be robust to error, and employ strategies for error detection and recovery.

Publications

Passonneau, R. J., Epstein S. L., Ligorio T., 2012. Naturalistic Dialogue Management for Noisy Speech Recognition. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (IEEE J-STSP)

Epstein S. L., Passonneau R. J., Ligorio T., Gordon J. B., 2012. Toward Habitable Assistance from Spoken Dialogue Systems. Proceedings of the 24th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference. Toronto, ON.

Epstein S. L., Passonneau R. J., Ligorio T., Gordon J. B., 2011. Data Mining to Support Human-Machine Dialogue for Autonomous Agents. Agents and Data Mining Interaction, Springer-Verlag.

Passonneau, R. J., Epstein S. L., Gordon J. B Ligorio T., 2011. The Role of Knowledge and Certainty in Understanding for Dialogue. In Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems. Washington, DC.

Passonneau, R. J., Epstein S. L., Ligorio T., Gordon J. B., 2011. Embedded Wizardry. Proceedings of the 12th SIGDial on Dialogue and Discourse. Portland, OR.

Ligorio T., Epstein S. L., Passonneau, R. J., 2010. Wizards’ Dialogue Strategies to Handle Noisy Speech Recognition. IEEE workshop on Spoken Language Technology (IEEE-SLT 2010). Berkeley, CA.

Passonneau, R. J., Epstein S. L., Ligorio T., Gordon J. B., 2010. Toward Spoken Dialogue as Mutual Agreement. In Proceedings of AAAI Workshop on Metacognition for Robust Social Systems. Menlo Park, CA.

Ligorio T., Epstein S. L., Passonneau R. J., Gordon J. B., 2010. What you Did and Didn’t Mean: Noise, Context, and Human Skill. Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (COGSCI 2010). Portland, OR.

Passonneau R. J., Epstein S. L., Ligorio T., Gordon J. B., Bhutada P., 2010. Learning About Voice Search for Spoken Dialogue Systems. Proceedings of NAACL – HLT 2010. Los Angeles, CA.

Passonneau, R., & Epstein, S. L. (2009). Help Me Understand You: Addressing the Speech Recognition Bottleneck. In Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium on Agents that Learn from Human Teachers.

Tiziana Ligorio, Susan L. Epstein. Partial Redundant Modeling. In: Peter van Beek, editor. Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP 2005, 11th International Conference, CP 2005, Sitges, Spain