Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

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Language Understanding in Cortana

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Language Understanding in Cortana

  • LecturerDr. Thomas Pan, Mei-Yuh Hwang (Microsoft)
    Host: Hsin-Min Wang
  • Time2014-12-18 (Thu.) 14:00 ~ 16:00
  • LocationAuditorium 106 at new IIS Building
Abstract

Microsoft announced Cortana in April this year for English version and July for Chinese version (localized name 小娜). Cortana is a personal assistant on Windows Phone 8.1. She can understand her master in making phone calls, sending and retrieving text messages, booking appointments, setting reminders and alarms, looking up weather, places, news, etc., and even chit-chatting with her master. In this talk, I will outline the workflow of implementing such a complicated system and elaborate the semantic understanding technologies, and how we expanded it from English to Chinese. Finally I will run some demo to satisfy the curiosity.

BIO

Dr. Mei-Yuh Hwang’s Bio:

Dr. Mei-Yuh Hwang obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where she majored in speech recognition and became one of the main contributors of SPHINX-II. Her interest has been always lied between research and product, which led her to contribution in both Microsoft speech research and speech server SDK. She left Microsoft for University of Washington in 2004 and led the Mandarin speech recognition efforts for the GALE project. Returning to Microsoft in 2008, she switched to machine translation development and delivered Bing Translator in six months with the translation team in Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA. Today Bing Translator supports the translation between more than 40 languages. With the emerging demand of semantic understanding, Mei-Yuh moved to China in 2012, and is now leading the language understanding efforts for Microsoft Cortana for global markets.

 

 

Dr. Thomas Pan’s Bio:

PhD., Computer Science and Information engineering, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

·         Focus: Speech Front End, Speech Recognition, Dialog system, Natural Language Processing

·         Experience:

o   Research Assistant in Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

o   Post Doc. in Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

o   Senior Engineer in Mediatek, Taiwan

o   Senior NLP Scientist Lead in Microsoft, China