[Colloquium] 3/6 Talks at TTIC: Nobuaki Minematsu, The University of Tokyo

[Mary Marre]

*When: *    Wednesday, March 6th at *3:00 pm*

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 530

Who:       Nobuaki Minematsu, The University of Tokyo



*Title:      *How can speech technologies support learners to improve their
skills of speaking, listening, conversation and more?





*Abstract: *In the globalization era, not only students but also immigrant
workers have to learn new languages for smooth oral communication in those
languages. In this talk, the lecturer illustrates how speech technologies,
i.e. speech synthesis, speech recognition, voice conversion, etc can
support learners to improve their skills of speaking, listening,
conversation, and more. Text does not show any prosodic structure
explicitly and native speakers use their implicit knowledge on prosodic
control to read aloud that text naturally. Implicit knowledge is difficult
for teachers to explain explicitly and therefore prosody training is rare
in classrooms. Text-to-speech systems often use a text-based prosody
prediction module and this module is used effectively to teach prosodic
control required to read given texts aloud explicitly to learners. In High
Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT), teachers use speech stimuli with
different ages, genders, accents, background noises, etc. Being exposed to
those variabilities, learners can obtain robust listening skills. However,
teachers prepare those stimuli manually. By introducing speech analysis and
voice conversion techniques, those variabilities are easily enhanced. In
the talk, an interesting example of adversarial training, which was
originally used for machine learners and is newly introduced to human
learners, and its effectiveness for acquiring robust listening skills are
explained. Further, use of speech recognition technologies for shadowing
assessment to improve parallel processing skills for conversation is
described. In the lecturer’s laboratory, a new project has started to
realize a novel speech assessment framework, where not native-likeness but
comprehensibility of learners’ speech is mainly focused on for assessment.
The lecturer shows recently obtained results of objective measurement of
comprehensibility of learners’ speech.





*Bio:*

Nobuaki MINEMATSU was born in Hyogo, Japan in 1966. He earned the doctor of
Engineering in 1995 from The University of Tokyo and now is a full
professor at Graduate School of Engineering there. When he was a high
school boy, he wanted to become a language teacher, but finally became a
professor of Engineering. He has a very wide interest in speech
communication covering the areas of speech science and speech engineering,
especially he has a good and practical knowledge on Computer-Aided Language
Learning (CALL) and has applied a variety of speech technologies for CALL.
He received paper awards from RISP, JSAI, ICIST, O-COCOSDA, IEICE in 2005,
2007, 2011, 2014, and 2016 and received an encouragement award from PSJ in
2014. He gave tutorial talks on CALL at APSIPA2011, INTERSPEECH2012, and
CASTEL/J2017. He was a distinguished lecturer of APSIPA from 2015 to 2016.
He has made remarkable contributions to technical and scientific societies.
He served as editorial chair of IEICE from 2014 to 2016 and chair of
SIG-SLP of IPSJ from 2016 to 2017, and has been serving as member of the
PSJ council from 2016. He also served as secretary of Speech Prosody 2004,
secretary of INTERSPEECH2010, co-organizer of SLaTE2010 (L2 workshop 2010),
and program chair of O-CCOSDA2018. He will serve as general chair of Speech
Prosody 2020. He is a member of IEEE, ISCA, SLaTE, IPA, APSIPA, IEICE,
IPSJ, ASJ, PSJ, JSAI, LET, etc.


*Host:* Dr. Sadaoki Furui



Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 517*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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