Alex Acero


2011

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The MSR system for IWSLT 2011 evaluation
Xiaodong He | Amittai Axelrod | Li Deng | Alex Acero | Mei-Yuh Hwang | Alisa Nguyen | Andrew Wang | Xiahui Huang
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

This paper describes the Microsoft Research (MSR) system for the evaluation campaign of the 2011 international workshop on spoken language translation. The evaluation task is to translate TED talks (www.ted.com). This task presents two unique challenges: First, the underlying topic switches sharply from talk to talk. Therefore, the translation system needs to adapt to the current topic quickly and dynamically. Second, only a very small amount of relevant parallel data (transcripts of TED talks) is available. Therefore, it is necessary to perform accurate translation model estimation with limited data. In the preparation for the evaluation, we developed two new methods to attack these problems. Specifically, we developed an unsupervised topic modeling based adaption method for machine translation models. We also developed a discriminative training method to estimate parameters in the generative components of the translation models with limited data. Experimental results show that both methods improve the translation quality. Among all the submissions, ours achieves the best BLEU score in the machine translation Chinese-to-English track (MT_CE) of the IWSLT 2011 evaluation that we participated.

2007

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Commute UX: Telephone Dialog System for Location-based Services
Ivan Tashev | Michael Seltzer | Yun-Cheng Ju | Dong Yu | Alex Acero
Proceedings of the 8th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

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Report on the NSF-sponsored Human Language Technology Workshop on Industrial Centers
Mary Harper | Alex Acero | Srinivas Bangalore | Jaime Carbonell | Jordan Cohen | Barbara Cuthill | Carol Espy-Wilson | Christiane Fellbaum | John Garofolo | Chin-Hui Lee | Jim Lester | Andrew McCallum | Nelson Morgan | Michael Picheney | Joe Picone | Lance Ramshaw | Jeff Reynar | Hadar Shemtov | Clare Voss
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI: Papers

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Voice-Rate: A Dialog System for Consumer Ratings
Geoffrey Zweig | Y.C. Ju | Patrick Nguyen | Dong Yu | Ye-Yi Wang | Alex Acero
Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT)

2006

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Combining Statistical and Knowledge-Based Spoken Language Understanding in Conditional Models
Ye-Yi Wang | Alex Acero | Milind Mahajan | John Lee
Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Main Conference Poster Sessions

2005

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Position Specific Posterior Lattices for Indexing Speech
Ciprian Chelba | Alex Acero
Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’05)

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SPEECH OGLE: Indexing Uncertainty for Spoken Document Search
Ciprian Chelba | Alex Acero
Proceedings of the ACL Interactive Poster and Demonstration Sessions

2004

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Use and Acquisition of Semantic Language Model
Kuansan Wang | Ye-Yi Wang | Alex Acero
Demonstration Papers at HLT-NAACL 2004

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Adaptation of Maximum Entropy Capitalizer: Little Data Can Help a Lo
Ciprian Chelba | Alex Acero
Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2003

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Speech Recognition and Understanding
Alex Acero
Companion Volume of the Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2003 - Tutorial Abstracts