Improving Access to Conversational Speech: The MALACH Project – Doug Oard (University of Maryland)
Abstract
The MALACH Project is one of four major collaborative research projects on which researchers at the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins and the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab at the University of Maryland have worked closely together. In MALACH, our collaboration has focused on the intersection between speech recognition and information retrieval, with a large corpus of oral history interviews in several languages as the specific application. In this talk, I’ll describe our progress to date with speech and search technologies, and with related work on text classification, machine translation, and information extraction. I’ll conclude the talk with a few remarks about the future directions that we are exploring together in the new GALE program.
Biography
Douglas Oard is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a joint appointment in the College of Information Studies and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, and his research interests center around the use of emerging technologies to support information seeking by end users. His recent work has focused on interactive techniques for cross-language information retrieval, searching conversational media, and leveraging observable behavior to improve user modeling. Additional information is available at http://www.glue.umd.edu/~oard/.