"NN: Neural Network Acoustic Modelling Across the Decades," Steve Renals

On March 13 and 14, 2015, ICSI researchers, alumni, and friends gathered to celebrate the career of Nelson Morgan, the founding leader of ICSI’s Speech Group and the director of ICSI for 12 years. Ten of his former students and current colleagues gave talks inspired by Morgan’s contributions both to science and to ICSI. For the full list of speakers and abstracts, go to
www.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsi/morganfest

Professor Steve Renals, who was a postdoc at ICSI from 1991 to 1992, spoke about the history and current state of speech recognition research.

Title: *NN: Neural Network Acoustic Modelling Across the Decades

Professor Steve Renals
Professor of Speech Technology
University of Ediburgh

Abstract:
Two decades ago neural networks were the hot topic in acoustic modelling for speech recognition - as they are now. Most of the key research questions in the early 1990s - adaptation, context modelling, robustness - form the research challenges that drive speech recognition research today. (Indeed, there are also close relations to research questions addressed in the early 1960s...) In this talk I'll link some of the work done to address these questions then and now, and discuss the progress that has been made, and how the work that Morgan and colleagues did twenty years ago (and more) has influenced where we are now - and where we are going.