Abstract
Spoken language is a primary form of human communication. Spoken language processing techniques must incorporate knowledge of acoustics, phonetics and linguistics in analyzing speech. While great strides have been made in the community in general speech recognition, reaching human parity in performance, our team has been focusing on the problems of recognizing and analyzing non-native, learners’ speech for the purpose of mispronunciation detection and diagnosis in computer-aided pronunciation training. In order to generate personalized, corrective feedback, we have also developed an approach that uses phonetic posterior-grams (PPGs) for personalized, cross-lingual text-to-speech synthesis given arbitrary textual input, based on voice conversion techniques. We have also extended our work to disordered speech, focusing on automated distinctive feature (DF)-based analyses of dysarthric recordings. The analyses are intended to inform intervention strategies. Additionally, voice conversion is further developed to restore disordered speech to normal speech. This talk will present the challenges in these problems, our approaches and solutions, as well as our ongoing work.
Bio
Helen Meng is Patrick Huen Wing Ming Professor of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She is the Founding Director of the CUHK Ministry of Education (MoE)-Microsoft Key Laboratory for Human-Centric Computing and Interface Technologies (since 2005), Tsinghua-CUHK Joint Research Center for Media Sciences, Technologies and Systems (since 2006), and Co-Director of the Stanley Ho Big Data Decision Analytics Research Center (since 2013). Previously, she served as CUHK Faculty of Engineering's Associate Dean (Research), Chairman of the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors, ISCA Board Member and presently Member of the ISCA International Advisory Council. She was elected APSIPA's inaugural Distinguished Lecturer 2012-2013 and ISCA Distinguished Lecturer 2015-2016. Her awards include the Ministry of Education Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award 2009, Hong Kong Computer Society's inaugural Outstanding ICT Woman Professional Award 2015, Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award 2016 (1 in 32 worldwide), IEEE ICME 2016 Best Paper Award, IBM Faculty Award 2016, HKPWE Outstanding Women Professionals and Entrepreneurs Award 2017 (1 in 20 since 1999), Hong Kong ICT Silver Award 2018 in Smart Inclusion, and the CogInfoComm2018 Best Paper Award. Helen received all her degrees from MIT.
Her research interests include big data decision analytics, and artificial intelligence especially for speech and language technologies to support multilingual and multimodal human-computer interaction. Helen has given invited / keynote presentations including INTERSPEECH 2018 Plenary Talk, World Economic Forum Global Future Council 2018, Taihe Workshop on Building Stakeholder Networks on AI Ethics and Governance 2019 and the World Peace Forum 2019. She has served in numerous Government appointments, including Chairlady of the Research Grants Council's Assessment Panel for Competitive Research Funding Schemes for the Local Self-financing Degree Sector, Chairlady of the Working Party on Manpower Survey of the Information/Innovation Technology Sector (since 2013), as well as Steering Committee Member of Hong Kong's Electronic Health Record (eHR) Sharing. Helen is a Fellow of HKCS, HKIE, IEEE and ISCA.
