The North Jersey Chapter of the IEEE Communications Society
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Center for Communications and Signal Processing
New Jersey Center for Multimedia Research
present
HOW MAY I HELP YOU?
Allen L. Gorin
Speech Research
AT&T Laboratories
Wednesday, April 30, 1997
Refreshment 4:45 PM, Seminar 5:00 PM
NJIT, ECEC Room 202
ABSTRACT:
We are interested in providing automated services via natural spoken dialog
systems. By natural, we mean that the machine understands and acts upon what
people actually say, in contrast to what one would like them to say. There
are many issues that arise when such systems are targeted for large populations
of non-expert users. In this ressearch, we focus on the task of automatically
routing telephone calls based on a user's fluently spoken response to the
open-ended prompt of "How may I help you?". We first describe a database
generated from 10,000 spoken transactions between customers and human agents.
We then describe methods for automatically acquiring language models for both
recognition and understanding from such data. Experimental results evaluating
call-classification from speech are reported for that database. These methods
have been embedded within a spoken dialog system, with subsequent processing
for information retrieval and form-filling.
BIOGRAPHY:
Allen Gorin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 27, 1953.
He received the B.S. and M.A. degrees in Mathematics from the
State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1975 and 1976 respectively,
then the Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Graduate Center of
the City University of New York in 1980.
>From 1980-83 he worked at Lockheed Electronics in New Jersey,
investigating algorithms for target recognition from time-varying
imagery. In 1983 he joined the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories
Federal Systems Division in Whippany. While there, he was the
Principle Investigator for AT&T's ASPEN project within
the DARPA Strategic Computing Program,
investigating parallel architectures and algorithms for
pattern recognition. In 1987, he was appointed a Distinguished Member of
the Technical Staff.
In 1988, he joined the Speech Research Department
at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. His current position is
as a Principal Member of the Technical Staff in AT&T Research.
His current research focuses on machine learning methods for
spoken language understanding. He has served as a guest editor for the IEEE
Transactions on Speech and Audio, and was a visiting researcher at the
ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Japan during 1994.
He is a member of the Acoustical Society of America
and a Senior Member of the IEEE.
