SLG

Date: 21th of october 2024 at 2PM Place: Thesis room, at the Hannah Arendt campus of Avignon Université. The videoconference link is the following: https://bbb.univ-avignon.fr/rooms/vtj-xje-xex-gyw/join .  The jury will be composed of: Dr Aurélie Clodic, LAAS-CNRS,  RapporteurePr Julien Pinquier, Université de Toulouse, IRIT, RapporteurPr Laurence Devillers, Sorbonne Université, LISN-CNRS, ExaminatricePr Olivier Alata, Université Jean Monnet, Laboratoire Hubert Curien, ExaminateurPr Fabrice Lefèvre, Avignon Université, LIA, Directeur de thèseDr Bassam Jabaian, Avignon Université, LIA, Co-encadrant Title: Proactive multimodal human-robot interaction in a hospital In this thesis, we focus on creating a proactive multimodal system for the social robot Pepper, designed for a hospital waiting room. To achieve this, we developed a cognitive human-robot interaction architecture, based on a continuous loop of perceptions, representation, and decision-making. The flow of perceptions is divided into two steps: first, retrieving data from the robot’s sensors, and then enriching it through refining modules. A speaker diarization refining module, based on a Bayesian model of fusion of audio and visual perceptions through spatial coincidence, was integrated. To enable proactive action, we designed a model analyzing the users’ availability for interaction in a waiting room. The refined perceptions are then organized and aligned to create a constantly updated representation of Plus d'infos

Date:  Jeudi 24 octobre à 15h Lieu: salle des thèses sur le campus Hannah Arendt. Vous pouvez également y assister à distance si vous le souhaitez grâce au lien suivant : https://v-au.univ-avignon.fr/live/bbb-soutenance-these-l-druart-24-octobre-2024/. Title : Towards Contextual and Structured Spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue Understanding Abstract : Accurately understanding users’ requests is key to provide smooth interactions with spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems. Traditionally such systems adopt cascade approaches which combine an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) component with a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) one. Yet, those systems still have trouble to accurately map complex user’s request with their internal representation. Recent work highlights potential directions to improve those systems. On the one hand, end-to-end approaches have successfully enhanced Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) system’s performance. Indeed, they provide more robust and accurate predictions by leveraging joint optimization and paralinguistic information. On the other hand, textual datasets propose fine-grained semantic representations. Such representations seem more adequate to represent user’s complex requests. This thesis explores both directions towards contextual and structured spoken task-oriented dialogue understanding. We first conduct a preliminary study dedicated to getting the grips of SLU in the context of TOD. We designed a cascade approach to perform spoken Dialogue State Tracking (DST) on MultiWOZ. Our approach ranked first in Plus d'infos

Date: 9th of Septembre 2024 Time : 3PM  Place: Ada Lovelace CERI’s amphitheater, at the Jean-Henri Fabre campus of Avignon Université.   The jury will be composed of:   Alexandre Allauzen, PR at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, LAMSADE – Rapporteur Benoit Favre, PR at Aix-Marseille Université, LIS – Rapporteur Marco Dinarelli, CR at CNRS, LIG – Examiner Nathalie Camelin, MCF at Le Mans Université, LIUM – Examiner Philippe Langlais, PR at Université de Montréal, DIRO, RALI – Examiner Fabrice Lefèvre, PR at Avignon Université, LIA – Examiner Yannick Estève, PR at Avignon Université, LIA – Thesis director   Sahar Ghannay, MCF at Université Paris-Saclay, LISN, CNRS – Thesis co-supervisor Bassam Jabaian, MCF at Avignon Université, LIA – Thesis co-supervisor Title: Spoken Language Understanding in a multilingual context This thesis falls within the scope of Deep Learning applied to Spoken Language Understanding. Its primary objective is to leverage existing data of large resourced annotated languages for speech semantics to develop effective understanding systems in low resourced languages. In recent years, significant advances were made in the field of automatic speech translation through new approaches that converge audio and textual modalities, the latter benefiting from vast amounts of data. By visualizing spoken language understanding as a translation task from a natural Plus d'infos

Lieu: Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Informatique (CERI), Amphi ADA – 339 Chemin des Meinajaries, CERI, 84000 Avignon. You can also attend the defense via video conference, using this link . You can fin the slides here. The jury members are the following: Pr. Tomi KINNUNEN, University of Eastern Finland – RapporteurPr. Alessandro VINCIARELLI, University of Glasgow – RapporteurPr. Tanja SCHULTZ, University Bremen- ExaminatricePr. Didier MEUWLY, Netherlands Forensic Institute, University of Twente- ExaminateurPr. Corinne FREDOUILLE, LIA, Université d’Avignon- ExaminatricePr. JEAN-FRANCOIS BONASTRE, Inria, LIA, Université d’Avignon – Directeur de thèse TITLE: Deep modeling based on voice attributes for explainable speaker recognition. Application in the forensic domain. Abstract:Automatic speaker recognition (ASpR) has been integrated into critical applications, ranging from customised assistant services to security systems and forensic investigations. It aims to automatically determine whether two voice samples originate from the same speaker. These systems primarily rely on complex deep neural networks (DNN) and present their results by a single value. Despite the high performance demonstrated by DNN-based ASpR systems, they struggle to provide transparent insights into the nature of speech representations, its encoding, and its use in decision-making process. This lack of transparency presents significant challenges in addressing ethical and legal Plus d'infos