From July 17 - August 25, 1995 the Center will be hosting an invited research workshop on Language Modeling for speech recognition. LM95 is a third workshop in a series sponsored by the Department of Defense, the previous two having taken place at Rutgers University in the summers of 1993 and 1994.

• Opening Day Program
  
• Calendar of Events
• Directions to the Center
  
• Using the Baltimore Washington Parkway approach from the South (Ft. Meade, MD; Washington, DC)
• Using I-95 from the South (Washington, DC)

Workshop lectures/seminars that are open to the public are indicated below in the sections LM95 Guest Participants and Guest Speakers at LM95.

This year there will be a total of 24 "full-time" participants all of whom are listed below.

Language Modeling Workshop 1995 CLSP/JHU
Workshop Chair: Frederick Jelinek CLSP/JHU

Senior Participants

• E. Brill (JHU)
• W. Byrne (JHU)
• H. Gish (BBN)
• F. Jelinek (JHU)
• M. Liberman (UPenn)
• H. Ney (Aachen, Germany)
• J. Oncina (Alicante, Spain)
• E. Ristad (Princeton)
• R. Rosenfeld (CMU)
• S. Roukos (IBM)
• E. Vidal (Valencia - Spain)
• M. Weintraub (SRI)

Additional Participants:

• G. Bordel (Bilbao, Spain)
• L. Chase (CMU)
• P. Dupont (CNET - France)
• R. Iyer (BBN)
• S. Khudanpur (UMd)
• S. Lowe (Dragon Systems)
• L. Shriberg (SRI) (for two weeks only)
• P. Srinivasa Rao (IBM)

Government Participants

• D. Harris (DoD)
• J. Prange (DoD)
• J. Unverferth (DoD)
• C. Van Ess-Dykema (DoD)

Student Assistants

• Thomas Niesler
• Eric Wheeler
• Xiaoqiang Luo
• Yaman Aksu
• Dimitra Vergyri

LM95 Guest Participants

In addition to the full participants, there will be eight guest participants who will visit for short periods from the fields of Linguistics and Information Theory. When it is decided what public lectures/seminars these guest participants will give, this information will be posted.

The week of July 31 - August 4, 1995 will be devoted to Linguistics, when four visiting scholars in the area will be present. These individuals are: A. Kroch (University of Pennsylvania), M. MacDonald (University of Southern California), M. Seidenberg (University of Southern California), and J. Groenendijk (University of Amsterdam).

The week of August 7-10 will be devoted to Information Theory, when four visiting scholars in the area will be present. These individuals are: T. Cover (Stanford University), I. Csizsar (Budapest, Hungary), P. Narayan (University of Maryland), J. Ziv (Technion-Israel).

Guest Speakers at LM95

LM95 will invite guest speakers twice a week. The guest lectures are planned for every Tuesday and Thursday at 12:00 NOON in Maryland Hall 110. All lectures given by these visitors are open to the public. When the Tuesday/Thursday lecture series is finalized a complete schedule will be posted.

Workshop Location

The workshop site is at Barton Hall on the Hopkins Homewood Campus. The laboratory is Barton 123.

Parking

General visitor parking is available at the Visitor Parking lot (fee charged) or at any of the meters on campus (quarters only).

Communications

The number where messages can be left for participants is (410) 516-8584 or (410) 516-4237. The fax number is (410) 516-5050. The address where mail may be sent is:

Smoking Policy. Johns Hopkins University is a smoke-free workplace. There is no smoking in the University's laboratories, offices, classrooms and cafeterias.

LM95 Details

Three teams will work on conversational English and one on Spanish. Success will be measured by speech recognition error rate achieved in English on the Switchboard corpus (the corpus for Spanish is not yet determined). It is intended that LM95 be provided with recognizer output lattices so that no complete recognition experiments will need to be run during the workshop.

As stated above, the participants will be formed into 4 teams, each with a distinct project goal. The goals, project leaders and teams are as follows:

• Spanish (Herb Gish, BBN): German Bordel, Lin Chase, Pierre Dupont, David Harris, Carol Van Ess-Dykema, Jose Oncina
• Sparse data training/portability (Mitch Weintraub, SRI International): Sanjeev Khudanpur, Hermann Ney, John Prange, Andreas Stolcke
• Language modeling for conversational speech recognition (Roni Rosenfeld, Carnegie Mellon): Bill Byrne, Rukmini Iyer, Mark Liberman, Liz Shriberg, Jack Unverferth, Enrique Vidal
• Phrase structure language models (Salim Roukos, IBM): Eric Brill, Steve Lowe, Srinivasa Rao, Eric Ristad

Succinctly put, the LM95 Workshop will have four goals:

1. To use language modeling to get better recognition results on conversational English speech over the telephone.
2. Start work on Spanish with the same eventual goals as above.
3. Develop a methodology for describing the content of conversations and for measuring the accuracy of the description.
4. Reach out to linguists and information theorists to engage them in work of interest to the Human Language Technology (HLT) community.

Directions

Directions to the Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus, Charles and 34th Streets, Baltimore, MD 21218-2686. Center for Language and Speech Processing (410) 516-4237

By CAR from the SOUTH (Ft. Meade, MD; Washington, DC) USING the BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON PARKWAY

• Proceed NORTH on Maryland 295 (Baltimore-Washington Parkway) toward Baltimore. DO NOT TAKE THE HARBOR TUNNEL, BELTWAY OR I-95 EXITS.
• Maryland 295 merges with Russell Street in the city. Proceed in the right lane to the exit for Martin Luther King Boulevard. It is well marked but you have to be careful to make the proper right exit off Russell Street and then take the left fork onto the overpass.
• Proceed North on Martin Luther King Boulevard. After the Eutaw Street Intersection, get in the left lane and follow the signs for Howard Street North.
• Proceed north on Howard Street, through an underpass and over a bridge.
• Follow Howard Street until it intersects with Wyman Park Drive and turn LEFT. (Wyman Park Drive is the first left after 29th Street, the Baltimore Museum of Art will be in sight, past Wyman Park Drive.)
• Follow the final approach instructions below.

By CAR from the SOUTH (Washington, DC) USING I-95:

• Proceed north on Interstate I-95. Do NOT take the Harbor Tunnel or Beltway exits. Follow signs for downtown Baltimore ("Inner Harbor/Memorial Stadium 395 North" and "395 North, Right Lanes"). The city skyline will be to the left.
• Take exits marked "395 North Downtown" and "395 Downtown/Inner Harbor." [NOTE: You may also be able to exit I-95 to Martin Luther King Blvd and follow the instructions for using the BW Parkway, starting with "Proceed North on Martin Luther King Boulevard."]
• TURN RIGHT at Conway Street (first traffic light).
• Proceed two blocks to Charles Street; TURN LEFT.
• Follow Charles Street NORTH (approximately 2.5 miles) to 29th Street.
• TURN LEFT onto 29th Street. Almost immediately ahead is a traffic light and beyond this light is a fork in the road. BEAR RIGHT on the fork and then merge onto Howard Street.
• Immediately cross over into the center lane and at the triangular intersection turn left onto Wyman Park Drive.
• Follow the final approach instructions below.

FINAL APPROACH --ENTRY into CAMPUS from WYMAN PARK DRIVE

• Once on Wyman Park Drive, on the right side of the road, less than 100 feet ahead, are the brick gates at the southern entrance of the campus. Turn right at this brick-gated entrance to the campus.
• Once inside the campus, there is a visitor parking lot on the left. Or you may continue up this drive and use the parking meters, also on the left.
• Barton Hall (Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Center for Speech Processing) is the second building on your right, on the same street with the visitor parking lot and directly across from the parking meters.
• The Tuesday and Thursday Lectures are held in Maryland Hall 110, which is in the lower quad, diagonally across from the front of Barton Hall. The Workshop location is Barton 123.

Updated 7 July 1995 - Mark L. Chang