Drs. Jeremy Morris and Eric Fosler-Lussier have been honored with a 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for their 2008 paper, "Conditional Random Fields for Integrating Local Discriminative Classifiers," published in the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. In this work, Morris and Fosler-Lussier explore the novel use of the Conditional Random Field (CRF) paradigm in an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system. CRFs are a statistical framework that allows for combination of correlated sources of evidence in a time sequence; the article examines how this framework can be used to incorporate short-term estimates of speech sounds in determining what was said in a speech utterance. These estimates can express probabilities over sound classes (e.g., is this snippet of sound a "t" or "ah"?) or phonological classes (e.g., is this snippet a vowel? a nasal consonant?). They compare phonetic recognition using CRFs to a standard Hidden Markov Model (HMM) ASR system, and show comparable or better performance in their system while minimizing the number of free parameters in the system.
The Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award is presented to up to six journal papers annually across all of the Society's Transactions; it "honors the authors of a paper of exceptional merit dealing with a subject related to the Society's technical scope." Papers published within the last five years in one of the Society's Transactions are eligible; nominations arise from one of the society's technical committees or editorial boards.
The award will be presented in May 2011 in a ceremony at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2011) in Prague, Czech Republic.
Jeremy Morris is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. from the department in June 2010; his thesis examined several aspects of Conditional Random Fields for ASR systems. He also received the B.S. degree from Bowling Green State University in 1996.
Eric Fosler-Lussier is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, with a courtesy appointment in Linguistics, at The Ohio State University. After receiving a B.A.S. (Computer and Cognitive Science) and B.A. (Linguistics) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, he received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of California, Berkeley, performing his dissertation research at the International Computer Science Institute under the tutelage of Prof. Nelson Morgan. He has also been a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and a Visiting Researcher at Columbia University. In 2006, Prof. Fosler-Lussier was awarded an NSF CAREER award, and in 2010 was presented with a Lumley Research Award by the Ohio State College of Engineering. He has published over 90 papers in speech and language processing, is a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the International Speech Communication Association, and a senior member of the IEEE.
Fosler-Lussier serves on the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2006-2008, 2010-2013), as well as on the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing and the Journal of Experimental Linguistics. He is generally interested in integrating linguistic insights as priors in statistical learning systems.