Karen Livescu

Word embeddings have become a ubiquitous tool in natural language processing. These embeddings represent the meanings of written words. On the other hand, for spoken language it may be more important to represent how a written word *sounds* rather than (or in addition to) what it means. For some applications it can also be helpful to represent variable-length acoustic segments corresponding to words, or other linguistic units, as fixed-dimensional vectors. This talk will present work on both acoustic word embeddings and "acoustically grounded" written word embeddings, multilingual embeddings, and their use for whole-word speech recognition

Biography:

Karen Livescu is an Associate Professor at TTI-Chicago. She completed her PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Her main research interests are in speech and language processing, as well as related problems in machine learning. Her recent work includes unsupervised and multi-view representation learning, acoustic word embeddings, visually grounded speech and language models, and automatic sign language recognition. She is a 2021 IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer and an ISCA Fellow. Other recent professional activities include serving as a program chair of ICLR 2019, a technical chair of ASRU 2015/2017/2019, and Associate Editor for IEEE T-PAMI and IEEE OJ-SP.