XUEDONG HUANG (MICROSOFT, USA): SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Abstract: Deep learning algorithms, supported by the availability of powerful cloud computing infrastructure and massive training data, constitutes the most significant driving force in our AI evolution journey. In the past three years, Microsoft reached several historical AI milestones being the first to achieve human parity in the following public benchmark tasks that have been broadly used in the speech and language community: 2017 Speech Recognition on the conversational speech transcription task (Switchboard); 2018 Machine Translation on the Chinese to English news translation task (WMT17) 2019 Conversational QA on the Stanford conversational question and answering task (CoQA). New neural text-to-speech service also helps machines speak like people. These breakthroughs have a profound impact on numerous spoken language applications. Furthermore, they are enabling more complex applications such as meeting transcription that requires real-time, multi-person, far-field speech transcription and speaker attribution. In this talk, he will present an overview of our work in these spaces as well as discuss challenges and some technical details.
Bio: Dr. Xuedong Huang is a Microsoft Technical Fellow in Microsoft Cloud and AI. He leads Microsoft’s Speech and Language Group. In 1993, Huang joined Microsoft to found the company’s speech technology group. As the general manager of Microsoft’s spoken language efforts for over a decade, he helped to bring speech recognition to the mass market by introducing SAPI to Windows in 1995 and Speech Server to the enterprise call center in 2004. Before Microsoft, he was on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. He received Alan Newell research excellence leadership medal in 1992 and IEEE Best Paper Award in 1993. He is an IEEE & ACM fellow. He was named as the Asian American Engineer of the Year (2011), Wired Magazine’s 25 Geniuses Who Are Creating the Future of Business (2016), and AI World’s Top 10 (2017). He holds over 100 patents and published over 100 papers & 2 books.