Prof. Dr. David Suendermann - Profession

Research Interests      Awards      Professional Activities      Publications      Press

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

Elected Member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee ("among the most active and accomplished researchers and technologists in the field"; since September 2009) US Green Card Holder, First Preference EB-1 ("foreign national with extraordinary ability in sciences"; since April 2008) Holder of a US O1 Visa ("alien of extraordinary ability in the sciences"; February 2007 to April 2008) Student Paper Contest Finalist of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 2006 Siemens PhD Fellowship (96,000 Euros; April 2003 to March 2007) Siemens Student Program Fellowship (December 1999 to September 2002)

Professional Activities

Program Committee Member/Chair   IEEE International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering 2011 (PC Member, Co-Chair) Interspeech - Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association 2011 (Organizer, Special Session on Crowdsourcing for Speech Processing; Session Chair) IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 2011 (Area Chair) IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding 2009 (PC Member) IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems 2008 (PC Member, Session Chair) Reviewer (Journals)   IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing IEEE Signal Processing Letters ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing Speech Communication (Elsevier) Computer Speech and Language (Elsevier) Language Resources and Evaluation (Springer) Reviewer (Conferences and Workshops)   IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008) Interspeech - Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (2011) Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (2011) IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (2010) IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (2009, 2007) IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems (2008)

Publications

Books and Chapters      Articles      Patents      Technical Reports      Theses      Invited Talks w/o Paper

Books and Chapters R. Pieraccini and D. Suendermann: Experiments in Automatic Grammar Localization of Commercial Spoken Dialog Systems. In Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications: From Theory to Practice, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, USA, to appear.   D. Suendermann: Advances in Commercial Deployment of Spoken Dialog Systems. Springer, New York, USA, June 2011.   D. Suendermann and R. Pieraccini: SLU in Commercial and Research Dialog Systems . In Spoken Language Understanding, Wiley, Hoboken, USA, May 2011.   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, September 2010.   D. Suendermann, H. Hoege, and A. Black: Challenges in Speech Synthesis. In Speech Technology: Theory and Applications, Springer, New York, USA, July 2010.   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.   Articles D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, J. Bloom, and R. Pieraccini: Topic and Emotion Classification of Customer Surveys. In Proc. of the 5th Workshop on Emotion and Computing, , Berlin, Germany, October 2011.   D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, J. Bloom, G. Li, and R. Pieraccini: Large-Scale Experiments on Data-Driven Design of Commercial Spoken Dialog Systems. In Proc. of the Interspeech 2011, 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Florence, Italy, August 2011.   D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, J. Bloom, G. Li, and R. Pieraccini: Deploying Contender: Early Lessons in Data, Measurement, and Testing of Multiple Call Flow Decisions. In Proc. of the HCI 2011, IASTED International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Washington, USA, May 2011.   D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, and R. Pieraccini: Contender. In Proc. of the SLT 2010, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Berkeley, USA, December 2010.   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.   E. Elrod, J. Cahn, and D. Suendermann: The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration. In Proc. of the AVIxD 2010, 9th Annual Workshop of the Association for Voice Interaction Design, New York, USA, August 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.   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.   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.   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.   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.   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, 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.   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.   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.   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.   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.   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.   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.   Patents D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, K. Dayanidhi, and R. Pieraccini: System and Method for the Localization of Statistical Classifiers Based on Machine Translation. International Patent Application Publication, March 2011.   D. Suendermann, J. Liscombe, K. Dayanidhi, and R. Pieraccini: System and Method for Building Optimal State-Dependent Statistical Utterance Classifiers in Spoken Dialog Systems. US Patent Application Publication, February 2011.   D. Suendermann, K. Evanini, J. Liscombe, K. Dayanidhi, and R. Pieraccini: System and Method for Improving Performance of Semantic Classifiers in Spoken Dialog Systems. US Patent Application Publication, October 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: Voice Conversion Method for a Speech Synthesis System. German Patent, December 2005.   Technical Reports 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: Voice Conversion Matlab Toolbox. Technical Report, Siemens Corporate Technology, Munich, Germany, February 2007.   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.   Theses D. Suendermann: Text-Independent Voice Conversion. Ph.D. Thesis, Bundeswehr University Munich, Munich, Germany, July 2008.   D. Suendermann: Development of a Tagger for the Text-To-Speech System Papageno. Diploma thesis, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany, April 2002.   D. Suendermann: Design and Development of General Symbol Statistics. Study work, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany, March 2001. Invited Talks w/o Paper (Selection) Translating Applications to New Languages. SpeechTEK, New York City, USA, August 10, 2011.   Automatically Generating Call Flows. SpeechTEK, New York City, USA, August 9, 2011.   Deployed Spoken Dialog Systems' Alpha and Omega: Adaptation and Optimization. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, March 25, 2011.   Transcribing and Annotating Utterances for Statistical Grammars. SpeechTEK, New York City, USA, August 3, 2010.   Using Statistical Grammars for the Continuous Improvement of Large-Scale Spoken Dialog Systems. AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, USA, November 18, 2009.   Voice Interaction Optimization (with Jackson Liscombe). SpeechTEK, New York City, USA, August 24, 2009.   Spoken Dialog Systems. Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Summer School of Human Language Technology, Baltimore, USA, June 16, 2009.   Coffee? Tea? Yes, Please (with Ethan Levine). SpeechTEK, New York City, USA, August 19, 2008.   Text-Independent Cross-Language Voice Conversion for Speech-to-Speech Translation. INESC-ID, Lisboa, Portugal, November 17, 2006.   Text-Independent Cross-Language Voice Conversion for Speech-to-Speech Translation. IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, USA, September 14, 2006.   Parameterization of Unit Selection-Based Speech Alignment. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia, June 6, 2006.   Residual Prediction. Google, New York City, USA, December 14, 2005.   Residual Prediction. Columbia University, New York City, USA, November 17, 2005.   Text-Independent Voice Conversion. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, October 11, 2005.   Residual Prediction. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, August 22, 2005.   Voice Conversion. Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, May 10, 2005.   Voice Conversion, Manipulation, and Compression. Center for Scientific and Technological Research ITC-irst, Trento, Italy, April 23, 2005.   Voice Conversion. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia, July 8, 2004.   VTLN-Based Voice Conversion. Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, November 27, 2003.   Development of a Tagger for a Text-To-Speech System. France Telecom/Orange Labs, Lannion, France, June 11, 2002.

Press

Business Wire: SpeechCycle Contributes to Leading Book on Spoken Language Understanding. About D. Suendermann's and R. Pieraccini's contribution to the book Spoken Language Understanding: Systems for Extracting Semantic Information from Speech, New York, March 2011.   Business Wire: SpeechCycle's Advanced Research to be Presented at Global Speech Technology Conferences. About D. Suendermann's presentations at SIGDIAL and Interspeech, Tokyo and Makuhari, Japan, September 2010.   Business Wire: SpeechCycle Stages Dominant Presence at SpeechTEK 2010. Among others, about D. Suendermann's presentations at SpeechTEK and AVIxD, New York, USA, August 2010.   M. Liberman: Death or Birth? 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. In Speech Technology Magazine. About a presentation of E. Levin and D. Suendermann at SpeechTEK in New York, USA, August 2008.   Business Wire: 11 SpeechCycle Team Members Selected to Present at the Speech Industry's Premier Conference. Among others, about D. Suendermann's presentation at SpeechTEK, New York, USA, August 2008.