AT&T Labs Research — Leading Invention, Driving Innovation

Interests

Planning under uncertainty and spoken dialogue systems:

• Dialog management: Applications of machine learning; integration of expert knowledge; multi-modal dialog management; planning techniques; on-line improvement
• Dialog and user modeling: Tracking and quantifying uncertainty in dialog state for human/computer dialog; representational structures for dialog state; ontology integration; simulation
• Turn-taking: Use of continuous/incremental speech recognition for turn-taking; integration of conversation history and user model for turn-taking
• Confidence scoring: Machine-learning-based approaches to confidence scoring; calibration in confidence scoring; features for confidence scoring
• Planning under uncertainty: Markov decision processes (MDPs); partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs); reinforcement learning.

Experience

• Microsoft Research, Researcher [as of 27 February 2012]
• AT&T Labs Research, Principal Member of Technical Staff, 2006-2012
• Cambridge University, Ph D, Engineering Dept, 2002-2006
• Edify Corp, Senior consultant - Usability and Speech Technology, 2002-2005
• Tellme Networks, Voice Application Development Manager, 2000-2001
• McKinsey & Company, Associate, 1999-2000
• Cambridge University, Masters, Speech/Language Processing, 1998-1999
• Princeton University, BSE, Electrical Engineering, 1994-1998

Software

AT&T Statistical Dialog Toolkit (ASDT): Toolkit for tracking a distribution over many dialog states in real-time. Python source available.

Educational materials

Overview talks (slides/videos)

• Jason D. Williams. 2011. Spoken dialog systems as an application of planning under uncertainty. Invited talk at International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), Freiburg, Germany. [video of talk]
• Jason D. Williams. 2011. Speech technologies for interactive mobile applications – a primer. Invited talk at Joint workshop of the Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD) and the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), New York City, USA.
• Jason D. Williams. 2009. Spoken dialogue systems: challenges, and opportunities for research. Invited talk at IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Merano, Italy.

Tutorial: Jason D. Williams, Steve Young, and Blaise Thomson. 2009. Statistical approaches to dialogue systems. Tutorial at Interspeech, Brighton, United Kindgom.

• One ZIP file with all tutorial materials (26 MB) [zip]
• Slides from tutorial [pdf]
• MDP learning with template points [avi] [wmv] and quadratic function approximation [avi] [wmv]
• Tourist information system based on the Hidden Information State model [wmv]
• Tourist information system based on Bayesian Update of Dialogue State model [wmv]
• Troubleshooting system based on particle filters [mp4] [wmv]
• Bibliography of about 200 papers related to statistical dialogue [pdf]

Interactive belief monitoring demonstration: This webpage illustrates how a distribution over multiple dialog states synthesizes priors, multiple N-Best lists, and a model of user behavior.

Peer-reviewed and invited publications/talks

Junlan Feng, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, John H. L. Hansen, and Jason D. Williams. 2012. Trends in Speech and Language Processing. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 177-179.

Jason D. Williams, I. Dan Melamed, Tirso Alonso, Barbara Hollister, and Jay Wilpon. 2011. Crowd-sourcing for difficult transcription of speech. IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Hawaii, USA.

Jason D. Williams. 2011. Speech technologies for interactive mobile applications – a primer. Invited talk at Joint workshop of the Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD) and the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), New York City, USA.

Jason D. Williams. 2011. Spoken dialog systems as an application of planning under uncertainty. Invited talk at International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), Freiburg, Germany. [video of talk]

Jason D. Williams. 2011. A case study of applying decision theory in the real world: POMDPs and spoken dialog systems. Chapter 16 in Decision Theory Models for Applications in Artificial Intelligence: Concepts and Solutions, L.E. Sucar, E. Morales, H. Hoey (Eds.). IGI Global.

Alan W Black, Susanne Burger, Alistair Conkie, Helen Hastie, Simon Keizer, Oliver Lemon, Nicolas Merigaud, Gabriel Parent, Gabriel Schubiner, Blaise Thomson, Jason D. Williams, Kai Yu, Steve Young and Maxine Eskenazi. 2011. Spoken Dialog Challenge 2010: Comparison of Live and Control Test Results. Proc SIGDIAL, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Ethan Selfridge, Iker Arizmendi, Peter Heeman and Jason D. Williams. 2011. Stability and Accuracy in Incremental Speech Recognition. Proc SIGDIAL, Portland, Oregon, USA. Best Student Paper Award. Also nominated for Best Paper Award.

Jason D. Williams. 2011. An Empirical Evaluation of a Statistical Dialog System in Public Use. Proc SIGDIAL, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Jason D. Williams, Iker Arizmendi and Alistair Conkie. 2010. Demonstration of AT&T "Let's Go": A production-grade statistical spoken dialog system. Proc Demonstration Session at IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT), Berkeley, California, USA.

Jason D. Williams. 2010. Incremental partition recombination for efficient tracking of multiple dialog states. Proc ICASSP, Dallas, Texas, USA.

Jason D. Williams. 2010. Spoken dialog systems as an application of POMDPs. Invited talk. POMDP Practitioners Workshop: solving real-world POMDP problems. ICAPS Workshop, Toronto, Canada.

Jason D. Williams. 2009. Spoken dialogue systems: challenges, and opportunities for research. Invited talk at IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Merano, Italy.

Jason D. Williams and Suhrid Balakrishnan. 2009. Estimating probability of correctness for ASR N-Best lists. Proc SIGDIAL, London, United Kingdom.

Lihong Li, Jason D. Williams, and Suhrid Balakrishnan. 2009. Reinforcement Learning for Dialog Management using Least-Squares Policy Iteration and Fast Feature Selection. Proc Interspeech, Brighton, United Kingdom.

Jason D. Williams. 2008. The best of both worlds: Unifying conventional dialog systems and POMDPs. Proc Interspeech, Brisbane, Australia.

Jason D. Williams. 2008. Exploiting the ASR N-Best by tracking multiple dialog state hypotheses. Proc Interspeech, Brisbane, Australia.

Jason D. Williams. 2008. Integrating expert knowledge into POMDP optimization for spoken dialog systems. Proc AAAI Workshop on Advancements in POMDP Solvers, Chicago, USA.

Jason D. Williams. 2008. Evaluating user simulations with the Cramer-von Mises divergence. Speech Communication (50)10: 829-846.

Umar Syed and Jason D. Williams. 2008. Using Automatically Transcribed Dialogs to Learn User Models in a Spoken Dialog System. Proc Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) with Human Language Technology Conference (HLT), Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Jason D. Williams. 2008. Demonstration of a POMDP Voice Dialer. Proc Demonstration Session, Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) with Human Language Technology Conference (HLT), Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Jason D. Williams, Pascal Poupart, and Steve Young. 2008. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with Continuous Observations for Dialogue Management. Invited chapter. Recent Trends in Discourse and Dialogue. Eds L. Dybkjaer and W. Minker, Springer. [expanded version of 2005 SIGDIAL paper]

Jason D. Williams. 2007. Using Particle Filters to Track Dialogue State. Proc IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Kyoto, Japan. Video demonstration in mp4 or wmv.

Jason D. Williams. 2007. A Method for Evaluating and Comparing User Simulations: The Cramer-von Mises Divergence. Proc IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Kyoto, Japan.

Jason D. Williams. 2007. Applying POMDPs to Dialog Systems in the Troubleshooting Domain. Proc HLT/NAACL Workshop on Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technology, Rochester, NY, USA. Video demonstration in mp4 or wmv.

Jason D. Williams and Steve Young. 2007. Scaling POMDPs for spoken dialog management. IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 15(7): 2116-2129.

Jason D. Williams and Steve Young. 2007. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for Spoken Dialog Systems. Computer Speech and Language 21(2): 393-422. In 2010, this paper received the ISCA award for best paper in Computer Speech and Language for the period 2005-2009.

Jason D. Williams and Steve Young. 2006. Scaling POMDPs for dialog management with composite summary point-based value iteration (CSPBVI). Proc AAAI Workshop on statistical and empirical methods in spoken dialog systems, Boston, USA.

Jason D. Williams and Steve Young. 2005. Scaling Up POMDPs for Dialog Management: The "Summary POMDP" Method. Proc IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), San Juan, Puerto Rico, USA.

Jason D. Williams, Pascal Poupart, and Steve Young. 2005. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with Continuous Observations for Dialogue Management. Proc SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Lisbon.

Jason D. Williams, Pascal Poupart, and Steve Young. 2005. Factored Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for Dialogue Management. Proc Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialog Systems, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Edinburgh.

Jason D. Williams and Steve Young. 2004. Characterizing Task-Oriented Dialog using a Simulated ASR Channel. Proc Intl Conf on Speech and Language Processing (ICSLP), Jeju, South Korea.

Matthew Stuttle, Jason D. Williams, and Steve Young. 2004. A Framework for Wizard-of-Oz Experiments with a Simulated ASR-Channel. Proc Intl Conf on Speech and Language Processing (ICSLP), Jeju, South Korea.

Jason D. Williams and Silke M. Witt. 2004. A Comparison of Dialog Strategies for Call Routing. Invited article. International Journal of Speech Technology, 7(1): 9-24.

Jason D. Williams, Lawrence Piano, Lizanne Kaiser, and Andrew T. Shaw. 2004. VUI Design Heuristics for Call Routing: Insights from Usability Testing. Invited article. Speech Recognition Update.

Jason D. Williams, Andrew T. Shaw, Lawrence Piano, and Michael Abt. 2003. Preference, Perception, and Task Completion of Open, Menu-based, and Directed Prompts for Call Routing: a Case Study. Proc Eurospeech, Geneva, Switzerland.

Silke M. Witt and Jason D. Williams. 2003. Two Studies of Open vs. Directed Dialog Strategies in Spoken Dialog Systems. Proc Eurospeech, Geneva, Switzerland.

Jason D. Williams and Steve Young. 2003. Using Wizard-of-Oz simulations to bootstrap Reinforcement-Learning-based dialog management systems. Proc SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Sapporo, Japan.

Jason D. Williams, Andrew T. Shaw, Lawrence Piano, Michael Abt. 2003. Evaluating real callers’ reactions to Open and Directed Strategy prompts. Proc Applied Voice Input/Output Society Speech Developers Conference, San Jose, California. Received award for best paper in conference.

Thesis, Corpora and other publications

Jason D. Williams. 2009. POMDP applications. Talk given at POMDP Workshop: Beyond Simple State Space Representation.

Jason D. Williams. 2006. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for Spoken Dialogue Management. Ph D Thesis, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge.

Steve Young, Jason D. Williams, Jost Schatzmann, Matthew Stuttle, and Karl Weilhammer. 2006. The hidden information state approach to dialogue management. Cambridge University Engineering Department Technical Report CUED/F-INFENG/TR.544.

Jason D. Williams and Steve Young. 2005. The SACTI-1 Corpus: Guide for Research Users. Cambridge University Department of Engineering Technical Report CUED/F-INFENG/TR.482. Email me for access.

Karl Weilhammer, Jason D. Williams, and Steve Young. 2005. The SACTI-2 Corpus: Guide for Research Users. Cambridge University Department of Engineering Technical Report CUED/F-INFENG/TR.505. February 2005. Contact Karl Weilhammer for access.

Jason D. Williams, Pascal Poupart, and Steve Young. 2005. Using Factored Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with Continuous Observations for Dialog Management. Cambridge University Engineering Department Technical Report: CUED/F-INFENG/TR.520.

Jason D. Williams and Steve Young. 2003, 2004, 2005. Short course on VoiceXML and voice user interface design. M Phil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology, Cambridge University.
    Lecture 11: Voice User Interface Design for Telephone Applications
    Lecture 12 & 13: VoiceXML
    Lecture 14: Building Applications with VoiceXML

Interns (current and former)

Ethan Selfridge, Summer 2010 and 2011.
Turn-taking in dialog systems.
Currently a PhD student with Peter Heeman, Oregon Health & Science University.

Hamid Chinaei, Summer 2010.
Reinforcement learning for dialog systems.
Currently a PhD student with Brahim Chaib-draa, Laval University.

John Asmuth, Summer 2009.
Bayesian approaches to reinforcement learning.
Currently a PhD student with Michael Littman, Rutgers University.

Lihong Li, Summer 2008.
Feature selection in reinforcement learning.
Currently at Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, California.

Umar Syed, Summer 2007.
Learning user models from unlabeled data.
Currently on a postdoc with Michael Kearns and Ben Taskar, University of Pennsylvania.

Patents

8010364: System and method for applying probability distribution models to dialog systems in the troubleshooting domain

[ + 10 more patent application filed with the US Patent Office ]

Appointments and organizer roles

IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies (SLT), Organizing committee, co-finance chair, 2012.

SIGDIAL Conference 2012, Organizing committee, sponsorship chair.

SIGDIAL Conference 2011, Organizing committee, sponsorship chair.

Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD), Board of directors, Treasurer, 2010-2012.

IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Organizing committee, publicity chair, 2011.

SIGDIAL Conference 2010, mentoring program coordinator.

ICAPS Workshop: POMDP Practitioners Workshop: solving real-world POMDP problems, Organizing committee, 2010.

Spoken Dialogue Challenge, Organizing Committee: 2010, 2011.

IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC), Elected member, 2009-2011.

IEEE SLTC Newsletter, Editor-in-chief, 2009-2011.

SIGDIAL - Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Science Advisory Committee, 2009-2010.

AAAI Workshop on statistical and empirical methods in spoken dialogue systems, organizer, 2006.

NAACL-HLT Demonstration program co-chair, 2007.

Young researchers' roundtable on spoken dialogue systems, organizer, 2005.

Journal reviewing and grant panelist

IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing reviewer: 2010, 2008, 2007.

Computer Speech and Language reviewer: 2010, 2009, 2008.

Computational Linguistics reviewer: 2009.

Speech Communication reviewer: 2011, 2010, 2008.

Journal of Natural Language Engineering reviewer: 2008.

ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing: 2010, 2011

Pattern Recognition Letters reviewer: 2010.

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine reviewer: 2007.

National Science Foundation (USA): service on 2 panels.

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada).

Conference program committees and reviewing

INTERSPEECH Scientific Review Committee: 2012, 2011.

SIGDIAL program committee: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007.

EMNLP program committee: 2009, 2008, 2006

ASRU Workshop program committee: 2011, 2009, 2007.

EACL scientific review committee: 2012, 2009.

ACL-HLT program committee: 2012, 2011.

ACL-HLT demo committee: 2011.

NAACL-HLT reviewer: 2012, 2009, 2007.

IJCAI program committee: 2011, 2009, 2007.

NIPS reviewer: 2010.

ICASSP reviewer: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007.

ECAI Workshop on Machine Learning for Interactive Systems (MLIS): 2012

IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems program committee: 2011, 2009.

IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLTC) technical program committee: 2010, 2008.

COLING Workshop: Spoken language technologies for pervasive speech-based and multimodal applications program committee: 2008

Young researchers' roundtable on spoken dialogue systems advisory board: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2006.

AT&T Labs service and awards

Recruiting committee (co-chair for lab-wide recruiting; chair, speech and language): 2011-2012

Recruiting committee (chair, speech and language): 2008-2009, 2009-2010

Distinguished speaker series committee: 2009, 2010

Publications committee (chair): 2009, 2010

AT&T Labs Research excellence award: 2007

AT&T Key Contributor award: 2009, 2010

AT&T Intellectual Property achievement award: 2010

AT&T Labs President Excellence Award: 2010