[Univ of Cambridge] [Dept of Engineering]

Jost Schatzmann

PhD Student

Dialogue Systems Group
Machine Intelligence Laboratory
Information Engineering Division

I am a final-year PhD student working for Prof. Steve Young at the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University. Previously, I did an MPhil here in Cambridge and a BEng at Imperial College in London. I am a member of Darwin College and my studies are funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust.

Research Interests

The focus of the Dialogue Systems Group is on the use of statistical approaches to Spoken Dialogue Systems, and in particular the application of Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) to dialogue management. The aim is to build systems that are trainable on real dialogue data and explicitly model the uncertainty present in human-machine interaction. Potential benefits include reduced deployment costs, more robust operation in adverse environments and the ability to adapt on-line. My research interests lie in the area of statistical user and error modelling for simulation-based Reinforcement-Learning of optimal dialogue policies.

Publications

  1. 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, AZ, March 30-April 4, 2008. (PDF, 200 KB)

  2. 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)

  3. 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)

  4. 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)

  5. 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. (see Steve's publications)

  6. S. Young, J. Schatzmann, K. Weilhammer and H. Ye. "The Hidden Information State Approach to Dialog Management"
    ICASSP 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii. (see Steve's publications)

  7. J. Schatzmann, K. Weilhammer, M. N. Stuttle, and S. Young. "A Survey of Statistical User Simulation Techniques for Reinforcement-Learning of Dialogue Management Strategies". Knowledge Engineering Review, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 21(2), pp. 97-126, June 2006 (PDF, 439 KB)

  8. S. Young, J. Williams, J. Schatzmann, M. Stuttle, K. Weilhammer. "The Hidden Information State Approach to Dialogue Management".
    CUED Technical Report CUED/F-INFENG/TR.544, 2005. (see Steve's publications)

  9. J. Schatzmann, M. N. Stuttle, K. Weilhammer and S. Young. "Effects of the User Model on Simulation-based Learning of Dialogue Strategies".
    IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 27 - December 1, 2005 (PDF, 136 KB)

  10. J. Schatzmann, K. Georgila, and S. Young. "Quantitative Evaluation of User Simulation Techniques for Spoken Dialogue Systems".
    6th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Lisbon, September 2-3, 2005 (PDF, 195 KB)

Talks & Demos

S. Young, J. Schatzmann, B. Thomson, K. Weilhammer, and H. Ye, The Hidden Information State Dialogue Manager: A Real-World POMDP-Based System.
Demo presented at HLT/NAACL 2007, Rochester, NY, April 2007

S. Young, J. Schatzmann, B. Thomson, K. Weilhammer, and H. Ye, The Hidden Information State (HIS) Dialogue System.
Demo presented at IEEE/ACL Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT 2006), Palm Beach, Aruba

J. Schatzmann and S. Young. Learning Dialogue Strategies with a Simulated User.
Talk presented at Dialog on Dialogs Discussion Group, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Aug 19, 2005 (PDF, 163 KB)

J. Schatzmann, M. N. Stuttle, K. Weilhammer and S. Young. Simulation-Based Strategy Learning.
Talk presented at Human Computer Research Centre, Edinburgh University, July 22, 2005 (PDF, 797 KB)

J. Schatzmann. User Simulation for Reinforcement Learning of Dialogue Strategies.
Talk presented at Joint Engineering and Computer Lab Dialogue Meeting, Cambridge, January 17, 2005 (PDF, 64 KB)

J. Schatzmann, K. Weilhammer, M. Stuttle and S. Young. "The SACTI-2 Data Collection: Observations and Analysis".
Talk presented at EU TALK Project Meeting, Seville, Spain, December 9, 2004 (PDF, 273 KB)

Other

J. Schatzmann. Speech Recognition in a Multimodal Context
MPhil thesis, Cambridge University, June 22, 2004 (PDF, 416 KB)

J. Schatzmann. Using Self-Organizing Maps to Visualise Clusters and Trends in Multidimensional Datasets
BEng thesis, Imperial College, June 19, 2003 (PDF, 2347 KB)

Contact Information

Jost Schatzmann
Fallside Laboratory
Engineering Department
Cambridge University
Trumpington Street
Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK

js532 at cam dot ac dot uk
++ 44 1223 765 758 (office)
++ 44 7855 909 425 (mobile)