David Suendermann - Profession

Research Interests Awards Reviewer of Publications Reactions

Research Interests

speech processing (voice conversion, speech synthesis, speech recognition)
natural language processing (POS tagging, language modeling, machine translation)
music theory and production (music statistics and signal processing)
dialog systems and statistical language understanding
mobile applications (speech processing for mobile devices, multimodal applications, interconnection of mobile and server-based applications)

Awards

Siemens Student Program Fellowship (December 1999 to September 2002)
Siemens PhD Fellowship (96,000 Euros; April 2003 to March 2007)
Student Paper Contest Finalist of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 2006
Holder of a US O1 Visa ("alien of extraordinary ability in the sciences"; February 2007 to April 2008)
US Green Card Holder ("foreign national with extraordinary ability in sciences"; since April 2008)
Member of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society ("among the most active and accomplished researchers and technologists in the field"; since September 2009)

Reviewer of

IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing
IEEE Signal Processing Letters
Speech Communication (Elsevier)
Computer Speech and Language (Elsevier)
Language Resources and Evaluation (Springer)
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding
IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems

Publications

2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001

2010

D. Suendermann and R. Pieraccini: SLU in Commercial and Research Dialog Systems . In Spoken Language Understanding, Wiley, Hoboken, USA, to appear.
D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, R. Pieraccini, and K. Evanini: 'How Am I Doing?' A Framework to Effectively Measure the Performance of Automated Customer Care Contact Centers . In Advances in Speech Recognition: Mobile Environments, Call Centers and Clinics, Springer, New York, USA, to appear.
R. Pieraccini and D. Suendermann: Experiments in Automatic Grammar Localization of Commercial Spoken Dialog Systems . In Multilingual Natural Language Applications: From Theory to Practice, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, USA, to appear.
D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, and R. Pieraccini: Minimally Invasive Surgery for Spoken Dialog Systems. In Proc. of the Interspeech 2010, 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Makuhari, Japan, September 2010.
A. Albalate, A. Suchindranath, D. Suendermann, and W. Minker: A Semi-Supervised Cluster-and-Label Approach for Utterance Classification. In Proc. of the Interspeech 2010, 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Makuhari, Japan, September 2010.
A. Schmitt, M. Scholz, W. Minker, J. Liscombe, and D. Suendermann: Is it Possible to Predict Task Completion in Automated Troubleshooters?. In Proc. of the Interspeech 2010, 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Makuhari, Japan, September 2010.
D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, and R. Pieraccini: How to Drink from a Fire Hose: One Person Can Annoscribe 693 Thousand Utterances in One Month. In Proc. of the SIGDIAL 2010, 11th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Tokyo, Japan, September 2010.
D. Suendermann: Five Techniques Multi-Modal Apps (Should) Inherit from Speech Science. In Proc. of the AVIxD 2010, 9th Annual Workshop of the Association for Voice Interaction Design, New York, USA, August 2010.
K. Dayanidhi, K. Evanini, P. Hunter, J. Liscombe, R. Pieraccini, D. Suendermann, and Z. Gorelov: System and Method for Robust Evaluation of the User Experience in Automated Spoken Dialog Systems. US Patent Application Publication, April 2010.
D. Suendermann: Speech Scientists Are Dead. Interaction Designers Are Dead. Who Is Next? [cached]. In Newsletter of the SLTC, Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, April 2010.
D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, and R. Pieraccini: Optimize the Obvious: Automatic Call Flow Generation. In Proc. of the ICASSP 2010, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Dallas, USA, March 2010.
A. Albalate, S. Rhinow, and D. Suendermann: A Non-Parameterized Hierarchical Pole Based Clustering Algorithm (HPoBC) . In Proc. of the ICAART 2010, 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, Valencia, Spain, January 2010.
A. Albalate, A. Suchindranath, M. Soenmez, and D. Suendermann: On Ambiguity Detection and Postprocessing Schemes Using Cluster Ensembles . In Proc. of the ICAART 2010, 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, Valencia, Spain, January 2010.

2009

R. Pieraccini, D. Suendermann, K. Dayanidhi, and J. Liscombe: Are We There Yet? Research in Commercial Spoken Dialog Systems . In Proc. of the TSD 2009, 12th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, Pilsen, Czech Republic, September 2009.
D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, K. Dayanidhi, and R. Pieraccini: A Handsome Set of Metrics to Measure Utterance Classification Performance in Spoken Dialog Systems. In Proc. of the SIGDIAL 2009, 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, London, UK, September 2009.
D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, K. Dayanidhi, and R. Pieraccini: Localization of Speech Recognition in Spoken Dialog Systems: How Machine Translation Can Make Our Lives Easier. In Proc. of the Interspeech 2009, 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Brighton, UK, September 2009.
S. Hura, J. Bloom, P. Hunter, C. Leathem, J. McKienzie, D. O'Sullivan, D. Suendermann, and D. Tucker: You Don't Have to Get Personal! IVR Customization via Situational Awareness. In Proc. of the AVIxD 2009, 8th Annual Workshop of the Association for Voice Interaction Design, New York, USA, August 2009.
D. Attwater, A. Auckland, J. Bloom, B. Budd, L. Kaiser, P. Krogh, D. O'Sullivan, M. Stallings, D. Suendermann, and J. Williams: Data Adaptive Dialog Systems. In Proc. of the AVIxD 2009, 8th Annual Workshop of the Association for Voice Interaction Design, New York, USA, August 2009.
D. Suendermann: Let Data Rule: Context-Adaptive Statistical Grammars. In Proc. of the AVIxD 2009, 8th Annual Workshop of the Association for Voice Interaction Design, New York, USA, August 2009.
A. Albalate and D. Suendermann: A Combination Approach to Cluster Validation Based on Statistical Quantiles. In Proc. of the IJCBS 2009, International Joint Conference on Bioinformatics, Systems Biology and Intelligent Computing, Shanghai, China, August 2009.
A. Albalate, D. Suendermann, R. Pieraccini, and W. Minker: Machine Learning for Categorisation of Speech Utterances . In Mathematical Analysis of Evolution, Information, and Complexity, Wiley, Hoboken, USA, May 2009.
D. Suendermann, K. Evanini, J. Liscombe, P. Hunter, K. Dayanidhi, and R. Pieraccini: From Rule-Based to Statistical Grammars: Continuous Improvement of Large-Scale Spoken Dialog Systems. In Proc. of the ICASSP 2009, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Taipei, Taiwan, April 2009.

2008

D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, K. Evanini, K. Dayanidhi, and R. Pieraccini: C5. In Proc. of the SLT 2008, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Goa, India, December 2008.
K. Evanini, P. Hunter, J. Liscombe, D. Suendermann, K. Dayanidhi, and R. Pieraccini: Caller Experience: A Method for Evaluating Dialog Systems and Its Automatic Prediction. In Proc. of the SLT 2008, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Goa, India, December 2008.
D. Suendermann, H. Hoege, and A. Black: Challenges in Speech Synthesis . In Speech Technology: Theory and Applications, Springer, New York, USA, August 2008.
A. Albalate and D. Suendermann: Speech Utterance Categorisation Given One Training Utterance per Category. In Proc. of the IE 2008, 4th IET International Conference on Intelligent Environments, Seattle, USA, July 2008.
D. Suendermann: Text-Independent Voice Conversion. Ph.D. Thesis, Bundeswehr University Munich, Munich, Germany, July 2008.
D. Suendermann, P. Hunter, and R. Pieraccini: Call Classification with Hundreds of Classes and Hundred Thousands of Training Utterances ... and No Target Domain Data. In Proc. of the PIT 2008, 4th IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems, Kloster Irsee, Germany, June 2008.
A. Albalate and D. Suendermann: Hard vs. Fuzzy Clustering for Speech Utterance Categorization. In Proc. of the PIT 2008, 4th IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems, Kloster Irsee, Germany, June 2008.

2007

K. Evanini, D. Suendermann, and R. Pieraccini: Call Classification for Automated Troubleshooting on Large Corpora. In Proc. of the ASRU 2007, 10th IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, Kyoto, Japan, December 2007.
D. Suendermann, J. Smrekar, H. Hoege, A. Bonafonte, and H. Ney: The Speech Alignment Paradox. In Proc. of the AST 2007, 14th International Workshop on Advances in Speech Technology, Maribor, Slovenia, June 2007.
D. Suendermann: Voice Conversion Matlab Toolbox. Technical Report, Siemens Corporate Technology, Munich, Germany, February 2007.

2006

H. Boril, P. Fousek, D. Suendermann, P. Cerva, and J. Zdansky: Lombard Speech Recognition: A Comparative Study. In Proc. of the 16th Czech-German Workshop, Prague, Czech Republic, September 2006.
D. Suendermann, H. Hoege, A. Bonafonte, H. Ney, and J. Hirschberg: Text-Independent Cross-Language Voice Conversion. In Proc. of the Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP, 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Pittsburgh, USA, September 2006.
D. Suendermann, J. Smrekar, and H. Hoege: Towards a Mathematical Proof of the Speech Alignment Paradox. In Proc. of the AST 2006, 13th International Workshop on Advances in Speech Technology, Maribor, Slovenia, July 2006.
D. Suendermann, H. Hoege, A. Bonafonte, H. Ney, and J. Hirschberg: TC-Star: Cross-Language Voice Conversion Revisited. In Proc. of the TC-Star Workshop 2006, Barcelona, Spain, June 2006.
D. Suendermann, H. Hoege, A. Bonafonte, H. Ney, A. Black, and S. Narayanan: Text-Independent Voice Conversion Based on Unit Selection. In Proc. of the ICASSP 2006, 31st IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Toulouse, France, May 2006. (Student Paper Contest Finalist)
D. Suendermann, H. Hoege, and T. Fingscheidt: Breaking a Paradox: Applying VTLN to Residuals. In Proc. of the ITG 2006, 7th Symposium on Speech Communication of the Information Technology Society, Kiel, Germany, April 2006.

2005

D. Suendermann: Voice Conversion Method for a Speech Synthesis System. German Patent, December 2005.
D. Suendermann, H. Hoege, A. Bonafonte, and H. Duxans: Residual Prediction. In Proc. of the ISSPIT 2005, 5th IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology, Athens, Greece, December 2005.
D. Suendermann, H. Hoege, A. Bonafonte, H. Ney, and A. Black: Residual Prediction Based on Unit Selection. In Proc. of the ASRU 2005, 9th IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, San Juan, Puerto Rico, November/December 2005.
D. Suendermann, G. Strecha, A. Bonafonte, H. Hoege, and H. Ney: Evaluation of VTLN-Based Voice Conversion for Embedded Speech Synthesis. In Proc. of the Interspeech 2005 - Eurospeech, 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2005.
D. Suendermann: A Language Resources Generation Toolbox for Speech Synthesis. In Proc. of the AST 2005, 12th International Workshop on Advances in Speech Technology, Maribor, Slovenia, July 2005.
A. Bonafonte, H. Hoege, I. Kiss, A. Moreno, D. Suendermann, U. Ziegenhain, J. Adell, P. Aguero, H. Duxans, D. Erro, J. Nurminen, J. Perez, G. Strecha, M. Umbert, X. Wang: TC-STAR: TTS Progress Report. Technical Report of the Project TC-STAR, Technology and Corpora for Speech to Speech Translation, May 2005.
A. Bonafonte, H. Hoege, H. Tropf, A. Moreno, H. v. d. Heuvel, D. Suendermann, U. Ziegenhain, J. Perez, I. Kiss: TC-STAR: TTS Baselines and Specifications. Technical Report of the Project TC-STAR, Technology and Corpora for Speech to Speech Translation, March 2005.
D. Suendermann, A. Bonafonte, H. Ney, and H. Hoege: A Study on Residual Prediction Techniques for Voice Conversion. In Proc. of the ICASSP 2005, 30th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Philadelphia, USA, March 2005.
D. Suendermann, A. Bonafonte, H. Duxans, H. Hoege: TC-STAR: Evaluation Plan for Voice Conversion Technology. In Proc. of the DAGA 2005, 31st German Annual Conference on Acoustics, Munich, Germany, March 2005.
D. Suendermann: Voice Conversion: State-of-the-Art and Future Work. In Proc. of the DAGA 2005, 31st German Annual Conference on Acoustics, Munich, Germany, March 2005.

2004

D. Suendermann, A. Bonafonte, H. Ney, and H. Hoege: Time Domain Vocal Tract Length Normalization. In Proc. of the ISSPIT 2004, 4th IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology, Rome, Italy, December 2004.
I. Esquerra, J. Adell, P. Aguero, A. Bonafonte, H. Duxans, A. Moreno, J. Perez, and D. Suendermann: Els Talps Tambe Parlen. In Proc. of the CELC 2004, II Congres d'Enginyeria en Llengua Catalana, Andorra la Vella, Andorra, November 2004.
D. Suendermann, A. Bonafonte, H. Ney, and H. Hoege: A First Step Towards Text-Independent Voice Conversion. In Proc. of the ICSLP 2004, 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Jeju Island, South Korea, October 2004.
H. Ney, M. Popovic, and D. Suendermann: Error Measures and Bayes Decision Rules Revisited with Applications to POS Tagging. In Proc. of the ACL/EMNLP 2004, 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics / Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Barcelona, Spain, July 2004.
D. Suendermann, A. Bonafonte, H. Ney, and H. Hoege: Voice Conversion Using Exclusively Unaligned Training Data. In Proc. of the ACL/SEPLN 2004, 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics / XX Congreso de la Sociedad Espanola para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, Barcelona, Spain, July 2004.
D. Suendermann, A. Bonafonte, H. Ney, and H. Hoege: Frequency Domain vs. Time Domain VTLN. In Proc. of the AST 2004, 11th International Workshop on Advances in Speech Technology, Maribor, Slovenia, July 2004.

2003

D. Suendermann and H. Ney: VTLN-Based Voice Conversion. In Proc. of the ISSPIT 2003, 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology, Darmstadt, Germany, December 2003.
D. Suendermann, H. Ney, and H. Hoege: VTLN-Based Cross-Language Voice Conversion. In Proc. of the ASRU 2003, 8th IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, Virgin Islands, USA, December 2003.
D. Suendermann and H. Ney: synther - a New M-Gram POS Tagger. In Proc. of the NLP-KE 2003, International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering, Beijing, China, October 2003.
D. Suendermann and H. Ney: An Automatic Segmentation and Mapping Approach for Voice Conversion Parameter Training. In Proc. of the AST 2003, 10th International Workshop on Advances in Speech Technology, Maribor, Slovenia, July 2003.

2002

D. Suendermann: Development of a Tagger for the Text-To-Speech System Papageno. Diploma thesis, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany, April 2002.

2001

D. Suendermann: Design and Development of General Symbol Statistics. Study work, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany, March 2001.

Reactions

M. Liberman: Death or Birth? [cached]. In University of Pennsylvania Language Log. About an article by D. Suendermann in the IEEE SLTC Newsletter, Philadelphia, USA, April 2010.
M. Goth: VUI Study Finds Simpler Is Better [cached]. In Speech Technology Magazine. About a presentation of E. Levin and D. Suendermann at SpeechTEK in New York, USA, August 2008.