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Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation (ILCC). www.inf.ed.ac.uk. Broad and Deep Strength in Research. Natural language processing and computational linguistics (SMT, web mining, parsing ...) Spoken language processing Dialogue and multimodal interaction
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Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation (ILCC) www.inf.ed.ac.uk
Broad and Deep Strength in Research • Natural language processing and computational linguistics (SMT, web mining, parsing ...) • Spoken language processing • Dialogue and multimodal interaction • Information extraction, retrieval and presentation • Computational models of human cognition • Educational and assistive technology • http://wcms.inf.ed.ac.uk/zope/iccs/research www.inf.ed.ac.uk
Example: Machine Translation • Develop and maintain Moses (> 450 downloads/month) • Dominant academic platform for statistical MT • Deployed commercially (e.g., Asia Online) • Directly influenced Google's Language Model • Group focus: • Large scale data (randomisation and streaming) • Novel machine learning methods for translation • Linguistics in translation www.inf.ed.ac.uk
Machine Translation: Aiding human translators
Example: Social Media Finding events mentioned In Twitter, in real time and at scale > 500 Million Tweets, > 1 Million Tweets/day
But the web is not all text • Image Retrieval: • Number of image collections is rapidly growing • Increasing demand for browsing and searching • Manual search is too costly • Retrieval Methods: • Image content-based retrieval system --> good query images • Text query-based retrieval --> annotated databases • Goal: Automatic image annotation • Exploit resources where images and annotations co-occur naturally (e.g., Wikipedia, Flickr) • News articles associated with images and their captions (BBC News Database) • caption describes image content directly or indirectly • document describes the content of the image • Use machine learning to associate images with keywords
Example: Image annotation Afghanistan, troop, Blair, British, NATO, helicopter, soldier, support, operation, commander Troops need more Chinook helicopters to carry out operations
Social Media: Model Prediction Market using Tweets (“Will Swine Flu become A Pandemic?”)
Example: Speech Recognition and Synthesis • Internationally known for speech synthesis and recognition • Speaker-adaptive speech synthesis • Recognition of multi-party conversation • Developed principal open source toolkit for speech synthesis research (Festival) • Co-ordinate the only international evaluation campaign for speech synthesis • Spinoffs • Text-to-speech: Rhetorical systems, Cereproc • Speech recognition: Quorate Technology (pre-spinout stage) • World leader in speaker-adaptive speech synthesis • EU FP7 EMIME Project; voice re-construction
Demo: voice construction from existing recordings • Voice for US film critic Roger Ebert • Loss of vocal function due to cancer • Pre-existing recordings (DVD commentaries) used by our spinout Cereproc to build a conventional unit-selection synthesiser • Huge media coverage • Example: • Oprah Winfrey show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMyxgSLESz8
Demo: reconstruction of voices which are already disordered • Original disordered speech • Reconstructed synthetic speech