Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory Seminar Series

Upcoming Talks

• Speaker: Francoise Beaufays and Brian Strope, Google, Mountain View, CA
  Time: Thursday, May 15th, 2008, 11:00 am
  Venue: STAR Lab, EJ 124
  Title: Deploying GOOG-411: Early Lessons in Data, Measurement, and Testing
  

  Abstract:

  We describe our early experience building and optimizing GOOG-411, a fully automated, voice-enabled, business finder. We show how taking an iterative approach to system development allows us to optimize the various components of the system, thereby progressively improving user-facing metrics. We show the contributions of different data sources to recognition accuracy. For business listing language models, we see a nearly linear performance increase with the logarithm of the amount of training data. To date, we have improved our correct accept rate by 25% absolute, and increased our transfer rate by 35% absolute.

  Brian Strope has been working on building, testing, deploying, and re-optimizing goog411 for the last couple years. Before that he worked on acoustic modeling, speech detection, and application tuning at Nuance. His PhD from UCLA is on signal processing, perceptual experiments, and ASR robustness. In a past life he designed workstation hardware for HP, and he currently spends a lot of his spare time playing golf with his 5 3/4 year old son.

  Francoise Beaufays is a research scientist at Google where she develops speech recognition products, and researches ways to optimize their performance. For the last 2+ years she has focussed mostly on building and growing Goog411. Prior to Google, she was a researcher in speech recognition at SRI and then Nuance. She holds a PhD, EE from Stanford. Francoise spends a lot of her spare time with her 5 and 7 year old daughters, Gina and Barbara.