What sparked your interest in speech and language processing?
Two things: I always had terrible penmanship, to the point of being marked as a miserable failure in grade school - it colored teachers' entire perceptions of me. In seventh grade, I read Isaac Asimov's Foundation triliogy, and at one point the heroine was composing an essay for school, which she does by dictating her sentences into a device that scribes them with beautiful penmanship. I thought to myself, "Gee! I wish I had such a contraption! I too could be considered a good student."
Second - my Dad was hearing impaired since he was 5 years old. When I entered grad school and was looking for a thesis topic, I heard that one of the research teams at MIT just received a large grant to study ways of building hearing aids. I did not think twice about approaching the people who became my thesis advisors - Prof. Louis Braida and Nat Durlach - and have not looked back since.
How do you think speech and language processing is changing the society for the new generation?
"Changing society" is one of these overhyped concepts too commonly used to describe anything from the discovery of fire to the introduction of a new flavor of ice cream. I think the impact to date has been relatively small - at least relative to things like the internet, cellphones, GPS, and peanut butter chocolate. There certainly is a lot of flash and some added convenience but the systems today are still quite constrained in what they can do. However, there is huge potential for a broad variety of consumer and enterprise impact once speech recognition becomes a bit more accurate and NLP and dialog technologies make bigger strides in terms of reducing customization effort and handling increasingly complex concepts. Let me also put in a plug for making searchable the large amount of spoken content that has never been transcribed because of cost. There is just so much knowledge out there that is still inaccessible because there are not easy-to-search-and-read textual representations available.
What is your holy grail in speech and language processing? When will we achieve it?
Do you have any specific advice for students, junior faculty or others early in their careers?
Oftentimes, the work that people get noticed for is not the work which they find the most exciting/rewarding/interesting. Which of your publications is your favorite? Why?
Well, if I may shamelessly plug some of my own work, I feel the three papers [1] [2] [3] I wrote with Lou [Louis Braida] and Nat [Nathaniel Durlach] on clear speech for my thesis are still very forward looking work even today. I was also extremely proud of the early work we did on Mandarin speech recognition back in the days when many people thought a much more complex approach would prove necessary to achieve any sort of reasonable accuracy. We also got into expressive TTS pretty early (maybe too early!). And of course I was and remain very proud to have contributed in some small way to the huge amount of great work that has come out of IBM over the years, ranging from the first real-time large vocabulary speech recognition prototypes to our much more recent accomplishments in Watson Cloud-based speech services, and pushing the word error rate down on difficult public speech recognition tasks such as Switchboard.
