Aaron Lawson

Research Linguist

CONTACT INFORMATION

Speech Technology & Research Laboratory, SRI International
333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA
Tel: (650) 859-4356
Fax: (650) 859-5984
Email: aaron AT speech.sri.com

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Language and Speaker Recognition
Natural Language Processing/Text
Noise Robustness
Speech Recognition
Speech Enhancement
Emotion Detection from Speech

CURRENT PROJECTS

EDUCATION

Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics (2001) Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Master of Arts, Applied Linguistics (1998) Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Master of Arts, in Languages, Linguistics and Literature (1994) Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, 1998

Bachelors in Foreign Languages (1992) Siena College, Loudonville, NY

PUBLICATIONS

Lawson, A., Leveque, K., Murray, J., Wang, W. Taylor, N., Jenson, J. and De Castell, S. "Socio-linguistic decisions and gender mapping across real and virtual world cultures". 2nd International Conference on Cross-Cultural Decision Making, July 2012, San Francisco, CA.

Lawson, A., Harris, D. & Battles, B. "Primal Weight Vectors Classification for Improved Speaker Identification in Difficult Acoustic Environments", IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA), October 2011.

Lawson, A., et al. "Survey And Evaluation Of Acoustic Features For Speaker Recognition", ICASSP 2011, Prague, Czech Republic.

Huggins, M., Smolenski, B., Lawson, A. "Two Novel High Accuracy Approaches to Speech Activity Detection in Noisy and Hostile Audio Environments", Interspeech 2010, Tokyo, Japan.

Huggins, M., Lawson, A. and Smolenski, B. "Cellular Class Encoding Approach to Increasing Efficiency of Nearest Neighbor Searching", ICASSP 2010, Dallas, TX.

Lawson, A., Stauffer, A., Smolenski, B, et al. "Long Term Examination of Intra-Session and Inter-Session Speaker Variability", Interspeech 2009, Brighton, UK.

Lawson, A., Stauffer, A., et al. "The Multi-Session Audio Research Project (MARP) Corpus: Goals, Design and Initial Findings", Interspeech 2009, Brighton, UK.

Stauffer, A., Lawson, A. "Speaker Recognition on Lossy Compressed Speech using the SPEEX Codec", Interspeech 2009, Brighton, UK.

Lawson, A., Linderman, M., Stauffer, A., Pokines, B. and Leonard M. "Perturbation and Pitch Normalization as Enhancements to Speaker Recognition", ICASSP 2009, Taipei, Taiwan.

Lawson, A., Linderman, M., Carlin, M., and Stauffer, A. "Automatic Data Enhancement for Language Identification using Voice Generation", Proceedings of Acoustics '08, Acoustical Society of America, Paris, France, 2008.

Stauffer, A. and Lawson, A. "Channel Mitigation Approach for Automatic Language Identification", Proceedings of Acoustics '08, Acoustical Society of America, Paris, France, 2008.

Stephane Pigeon, Wade Shen, Aaron D. Lawson, David A. van Leeuwen "Design and characterization of the non-native military air traffic communications database (nnMATC)". Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium.

Lawson, A., Stauffer, A., Wenndt, S., "External Factors Impacting the Performance of Speaker Identification in the Multisession Audio Research Project (MARP) Corpus", 153rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Salt Lake City, June 4-8, 2007.

Lawson, A., Huggins, M., Harris, D., Grieco, J. "Automatic Speech Recognition Fusion Approach To Unsupervised Speaker Clustering And Labeling", IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings, Big Sky, Montana, USA, March 2005.

Lawson, A. and Huggins, M. "Triphone-Based Confidence System for Speaker Identification", Interspeech 2004, Jeju, Korea.

Lawson, A., Harris, D., Grieco, J. "Effect of Foreign Accent on Speech Recognition in the NATO N-4 Corpus", Interspeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland.

Lawson, A. "Automatic Entity Extraction and Activity Detection for Aerospace Communications", IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings, Big Sky, Montana, USA, March 2004.

Lawson, A. "Unsupervised Document Classification Using Emergent Ontology Generation", The Fourth North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics. IUPUI, Indianapolis, IN, 2002.

Lawson, A. "Genre Identification in Unstructured Text via Stop-Word Vectors", The Third North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics. University of Massachusetts-Boston, Boston, MA, 2001.

Lawson, A. "Rethinking French Grammar for Pedagogy: The Contribution of Spoken Corpora", chapter in Corpus Linguistics in North America, University of Michigan Press, 2001.

Lawson, A. "Ideology and Indoctrination: The Framing of Language in 20th-Century Introductions to Linguistics." Language Sciences, vol. 23, number 1, pp 1-14, January 2001.

DISSERTATION

"Topic Management And Demonstratives In Spoken English And French: A Corpus-Based Approach", Cornell University, 2001.

Thesis investigated topic identification and anaphora in spontaneous speech in both English and French. One of the first linguistics studies to use statistical techniques and large corpora of spoken language to study linguistic and pragmatic structure across speech domains such as meetings, conversations and language in the physical environment.

HOBBIES