CLSP Spring Seminar Series: Abeer Alwan

Description

Abeer Alwan, a professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UCLA, will present a Center for Language and Speech Processing seminar titled "Dealing with Limited Speech Data and Variability: Three Case Studies."

Abstract:

Our research focuses on improving speech processing algorithms, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification, and depression detection, under challenging conditions such as limited data (for example, children's or clinical speech), mismatched conditions (for example, training on read speech while recognizing conversational speech), and noisy speech, using a hybrid data-driven and knowledge-based approach. This approach requires understanding of both machine learning approaches and of the human speech production and perception systems. I will summarize in this talk our work on children's ASR using self-supervised models, detecting depression from speech signals using novel speaker disentaglement techniques, and automating scoring of children's reading tasks with both ASR and innovative NLP algorithms.