Biography:

Tatsuya Kawahara received B.E. in 1987, M.E. in 1989, and Ph.D. in 1995, all in information science, from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.  Currently, he is a Professor in the Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies and an Affiliated Professor in the School of Informatics, Kyoto University. He has also been an Invited Researcher at ATR and NICT. He has published more than 250 technical papers on speech recognition, spoken language processing, and spoken dialogue systems. He has been conducting several speech-related projects in Japan including free large vocabulary continuous speech recognition software (http://julius.sourceforge.jp/) and the automatic transcription system for the Japanese Parliament (Diet).

Dr. Kawahara received the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) in 2012. From 2003 to 2006, he was a member of IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee.  He was a general chair of IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition \& Understanding workshop (ASRU 2007). He also served as a Tutorial Chair of INTERSPEECH 2010 and a Local Arrangement Chair of IEEE ICASSP 2012. He is an editorial board member of Elsevier Journal of Computer Speech and Language, ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, and APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information.  He is a senior member of IEEE.

Abstract:

There has been significant progress in spoken dialogue systems both in research and deployment. This talk will give a brief history of spoken dialogue systems including their evolution and recent technical trend. In the new perspective, back-end of spoken dialogue systems is extended from conventional relational databases (RDB) to general documents, incorporating information retrieval (IR) and question-answering (QA) techniques. This paradigm shift and the author's approaches are reviewed.