March 23rd - Yannick Estève


Yannick Estève (University of Avignon)

A brief history of Spoken Language Understanding

Abstract:

Spoken Language Understanding consists in extracting semantic information conveyed by speech signal in order to project it into a representation manageable by a software application. This research topic encompasses several tasks like domain classification, named entity recognition, slot filling… By some aspects, it is also very close to machine translation. SLU has been encouraged by NIST effort during the 90’s and during the last three decades different recurrent issues has been addressed. This presentation will present a brief overview of the main research work done during this period, in order to better understand the benefits of the recent single neural end-to-end system that extract semantics directly from speech.

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Bio: Yannick Estève is Professor in Computer Science at the University of Avignon. He is the head of the laboratory of computer science of Avignon (LIA, ~80 people) since May 2020. His main research interests are spoken language understanding and speech recognition. He has published more than 150 scientific publications on these topics in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He got his PhD on 2002, then worked 2002 at France Telecom Research & Development (now Orange Labs) as a research engineer, before becoming an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Labs (LIUM) of the University of Le Mans (France) in 2003, and a Professor in 2010. He headed the LIUM from 2012 to 2016. In 2018, he moved to the University of Avignon. His current research activities focus on spoken language understanding, speech translation, speech analytics, speech recognition, emotion recognition, deep neural networks.