Embeddings for spoken words – Learning-Club talk by Karen Livescu

Karen Livescu from TTIC

Location: Gonda building (901), room 102.

Time: Sunday Dec 22th, 12:00 AM — 13:00 AM.

Title: Embeddings for spoken words

Abstract: Word embeddings have become a ubiquitous tool in natural language processing. These embeddings represent the meanings of written words. On the other hand, for spoken language it may be more important to represent how a written word *sounds* rather than (or in addition to) what it means. For some applications it can also be helpful to represent variable-length acoustic segments corresponding to words, or other linguistic units, as fixed-dimensional vectors. This talk will present work on both acoustic word embeddings and “acoustically grounded” written word embeddings, including their applications for improved speech recognition and search.

Bio: Karen Livescu is an Associate Professor at TTI-Chicago. She completed her PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Her main research interests are in speech and language processing and machine learning. Her recent work includes multi-view representation learning, acoustic word embeddings, visually grounded speech modeling, and automatic sign language recognition. Her recent professional activities include serving as a member of the IEEE Spoken Language Technical Committee, an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, a technical co-chair of ASRU 2015/2017/2019, and a program co-chair of ICLR 2019.