Research
My research interests include speech recognition, synthesis and spoken dialogue systems. I am the inventor and original author of the HTK Toolkit for building hidden Markov model-based recognition systems (see http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk), and I co-developed the original HTK large vocabulary speech recognition system which has figured strongly in DARPA/NIST evaluations since it was first introduced in the early nineties. More recently I have worked on statistical dialogue systems and pioneered the use of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for modelling them. I also have industrial experience including four years working in the Apple Siri development team.
Publications
J. Williams and S. Young (2007). Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for Spoken Dialog Systems. Computer Speech and Language 21(2):231-422.
S. Young, M. Gasic, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, J. Schatzmann, B. Thomson and K. Yu (2010). The Hidden Information State Model: a practical framework for POMDP-based spoken dialogue management. Computer Speech and Language, 24(2): 150-174.
F. Jurcicek, B. Thomson and S. Young (2012). Reinforcement learning for parameter estimation in statistical spoken dialogue systems. Computer Speech and Language, 26(3):127-228
S. Young (2010). Cognitive User Interfaces. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine,27(3): 128-140.
K. Yu and S. Young (2011). Continuous F0 Modelling for HMM based Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis. IEEE Trans. Audio, Speech and Language Processing, to appear, 19(5):1071-1079.
