Interactive Pattern Recognition and selected Applications for Speech Technologies

María Inés Torres

University of the Basque Country

Tuesday, April 9, 2013
12:30 p.m., Conference Room 5A

Abstract:

The paradigm for Pattern Recognition (PR) systems design is shifting from the concept of full-automation to systems where the decision process is conditioned by human feedback. The recent Interactive Pattern Recognition (IPR) paradigm places the PR system within the human-interaction framework. This framework allows the system to take direct advantage of the feedback information provided by the user; it also allows it to acknowledge the inherent multimodality of interaction to improve overall system behavior and usability as well as to use the feedback-derived data to adaptively retrain the system. This talk addresses the IPR paradigm. We first introduce the IPR paradigm and briefly explore its main challenges. Then we turn to some selected works dealing with IPR applications for the speech and language technologies; namely computer assisted transcription, interactive machine translation and spoken dialog systems.

Bio:

María Inés Torres received her PhD in Physics from the University of the Basque Country in 1990, including an internship at the Centre National d’Études des Télécommunications in Lanion (France) in 1988. She was also a visiting researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) during the years 1991 and 1992. She has been a member of the board of the Spanish Association of Pattern Recognition and Image, which is a member of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR), from 1995 to 2008. She is currently a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of the Basque Country where she founded the Pattern Recognition and Speech Technology research group in 1990, which she has been leading since then, and held several academic management positions. She was also a visiting Faculty at the Language Technologies Institute in Carnegie Mellon University during five months in 2012. She has published numerous papers in journals and international conferences and edited three books.