Blaise Thomson - University of Cambridge

Blaise Thomson

Research Fellow
Dialogue Systems Group Engineering Department University of Cambridge	St John's College University of Cambridge

About me

I am a Research Fellow at St John's college. I work in the Dialogue Systems Group at Cambridge University, headed by Prof. Steve Young. I also work in collaboration with the Classic project. I have a profile at about.me

B. Thomson (2009). "Statistical methods for spoken dialogue management." Ph.D. Thesis. University of Cambridge. PDF

B. Thomson and S.Young (2010). "Bayesian update of dialogue state: A POMDP framework for spoken dialogue systems." Computer Speech and Language. Final . (Draft)

S. Young, M. Gasic, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, J. Schatzmann, B. Thomson and K. Yu (2010). "The Hidden Information State Model: a practical framework for POMDP-based spoken dialogue management." Computer Speech and Language. PDF

F. Jurcicek, B. Thomson, S. Young (2011) "Reinforcement learning for parameter estimation in statistical spoken dialogue systems (Accepted)". Computer Speech and Language

Ulrich Paquet, Blaise Thomson, and Ole Winther (2011). A Hierarchical Model for Ordinal Matrix Factorization Statistics and Computing (preprint;final)

A. W. Black, S. Burger, A. Conkie, H. Hastie, S. Keizer, O. Lemon, N. Merigaud, G. Parent, G. Schubiner, B. Thomson, J. D. Williams, K. Yu, S. Young and M. Eskenazi. (2011) Spoken Dialog Challenge 2010: Comparison of Live and Control Test Results . SIGDial 2011. (PDF)

F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, M. Gasic, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu, and S. Young. (2011) Real user evaluation of spoken dialogue systems using Amazon Mechanical Turk INTERSPEECH 2011.(PDF)

M. Gasic, F. Jurcicek, B. Thomson, K. Yu, S. Young. (2011) On-line policy optimisation of spoken dialogue systems via live interaction with human subjects. IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding.

Ulrich Paquet, Blaise Thomson, and Ole Winther (2011) Large-scale Ordinal Collaborative Filtering (pdf) 1st Workshop on Mining the Future Internet, Future Internet Symposium, Berlin, September 2010.

B. Thomson, K. Yu, S. Keizer, M. Gasic, F. Jurcicek, F. Mairesse, S. Young. (2010) "Parameter learning for POMDP spoken dialogue models". SLT 2010. (Best paper award)

B. Thomson, K. Yu, S. Keizer, M. Gasic, F. Jurcicek, F. Mairesse, S. Young. (2010) "Bayesian dialogue system for the Let's Go spoken dialogue challenge". SLT 2010 Special Session: The Spoken Dialogue Challenge.

K. Yu, B. Thomson and S. Young. (2010) "From discontinuous to continuous F0 modelling In HMM-based speech synthesis". ISCA SSW7 2010.

F. Jurcicek, B. Thomson, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, M. Gasic, K. Yu and S. Young. (2010) "Natural Belief-Critic: a reinforcement algorithm for parameter estimation in statistical spoken dialogue systems". INTERSPEECH 2010. (Best paper award)

M. Gasic, F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. (2010) "Gaussian processes for fast policy optimisation of POMDP-based dialogue managers". SIGDial 2010.

S. Keizer, M. Gasic, F. Jurcicek, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. (2010) Parameter estimation for agenda-based user simulation. SIGDial 2010.

F. Mairesse, M. Gasic, F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, J. Prombonas, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. (2010) "Phrase-based statistical language generation using graphical models and active learning" . ACL 2010.

M. Gasic, F.Lefevre, F. Jurccek, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu, S. Young (2009). "Back-off Action Selection in Summary Space-Based POMDP dialogue systems." ASRU 2009, Italy.

F. Lefevre, M. Gasic, F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young (2009). "k-Nearest Neighbor Monte-Carlo Control Algorithm for POMDP-based Dialogue Systems. " SigDial 2009, London, UK. PDF

F. Jurcicek, M. Gasic, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson and S. Young (2009). "Transformation-based Learning for Semantic Parsing. " Interspeech 2009, Brighton, UK. PDF

K. Yu, T. Toda, M. Gasic, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, S. Young. (2009) "Probabilistic modelling of F0 in unvoiced regions in HMM based speech synthesis" . ICASSP 2009, Taiwan.

F. Mairesse, M. Gasic, F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, B. Thomson, K. Yu, S. Young. (2009) "Spoken language understanding from unaligned data using discriminative classification models" . ICASSP 2009, Taiwan.

S. Keizer, M. Gasic, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu, and S. Young. "Modelling user behaviour in the HIS-POMDP dialogue manager." In Proceedings of SLT, Goa, India, December 2008.

B. Thomson, K. Yu, M. Gasic, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, J. Schatzmann and S. Young. "Evaluating semantic-level confidence scores with multiple hypotheses", Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia. PDF, 243 KB

B. Thomson, M. Gasic, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, J. Schatzmann, K.Yu and S. Young. "User study of the Bayesian Update of Dialogue State approach to dialogue management", Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia. PDF, 338 KB

M. Gasic, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, J. Schatzmann, B. Thomson, S. Young. "Training and Evaluation of the HIS POMDP Dialogue System in Noise." Sigdial, Columbus, Ohio, 2008. PDF, 193 KB

B. Thomson, J. Schatzmann and S. Young. "Bayesian Update of Dialogue State for Robust Dialogue Systems",
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Las Vegas, NV, March 30-April 4, 2008. PDF, 201 KB
(2008 IEEE Student Spoken Language Processing Grant)

J. Schatzmann, B. Thomson and S. Young. "Error Simulation for Training Statistical Dialogue Systems",
IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, Kyoto, Japan, December 9-13, 2007. PDF, 129 KB
J. Schatzmann, B. Thomson and S. Young. "Statistical User Simulation with a Hidden Agenda",
8th SIGDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Antwerp, Belgium, September 2-3, 2007. PDF, 146 KB
J. Schatzmann, B. Thomson, K. Weilhammer, H. Ye, and S. Young. "Agenda-based User Simulation for Bootstrapping a POMDP Dialogue System." HLT/NAACL, Rochester, NY, April 23-25, 2007. PDF, 73 KB
B. Thomson, J. Schatzmann, K. Weilhammer, H. Ye, and S. Young. "Training a real-world POMDP Dialogue System",
HLT/NAACL Workshop "Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technologies", Rochester, NY, April 26, 2007. PDF, 215 KB

Blaise Thomson
Engineering Department
Cambridge University
Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK

++ 44 1223 765 758 (office)