Milica Gašić Research Associate Dialogue Systems Group Machine Intelligence Laboratory Information Engineering Division I graduated in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Belgrade at the Faculty of Mathematics in 2006. Since then, I have been at the University of Cambridge, first, as an MPhil student studying Computer Speech Text and Internet Technology at the Computer Laboratory. Subsequently, I did a PhD in Statistical Dialogue Modelling under the supervision of Prof Steve Young at the Engineering Department. My research was funded by the EPSRC project Spoken Dialogue Management using Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes and I also worked in collaboration with the EC FP7 project Computational Learning in Adaptive Systems for Spoken Conversation. Since January 2011, I have been a Research Associate in the Dialogue Systems Group. Initially, I was funded by an EPSRC PhD plus grant and currently I am funded by a General Motors project. I also work in collaboration with the Parlance project, an EU FP7 project. My research lies in the area of Spoken Dialogue Systems, with a particular focus on Partially Observable Markov Decision Process as means to model the uncertainty in human computer interaction via speech. I am greatly interested in Machine Learning algorithms and their application to robust Dialogue Management. A demo of a spoken dialogue system developed by our group is available here. Alternatively, you can call our telephone-based spoken dialogue system on +44 1223 852 453.

Thesis

• M. Gašić "Statistical Dialoguge Modelling", PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. PDF

Book Chapter

• M. Gašić, F. Jurcicek, B. Thomson and S. Young, "Optimisation for POMDP-based Spoken Dialogue Systems", Chapter 5 of "Data-driven Methods for Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Systems: Computational Learning for Conversational Interfaces", Springer, 2012

Journal Publications

• S. Young, M. Gašić, B. Thomson and J.D. Williams "POMDP-based Spoken Dialogue Systems: a Rewiew", Special Issue of the IEEE Proceedings on Speech Information Processing - Theory and Applications, to appear
• M. Gašić and S. Young. "Effective Handling of Dialogue State in the Hidden Information State POMDP-based Dialogue Manager", ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, 2011. PDF, 899 KB
• S. Young, M. Gašić, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, J. Schatzmann, B. Thomson and K. Yu. "The Hidden Information State Model: a practical framework for POMDP-based spoken dialogue management", Computer Speech and Language,24(2): 150-174, 2010. PDF, 1 MB

Peer-reviewed Conference Publications

2013

• M. Gašić, C. Breslin, M. Henderson, D. Kim, M. Szummer, B. Thomson, P. Tsiakoulis and S. Young. "On-line policy optimisation of Bayesian spoken dialogue systems via human interaction", ICASSP, Vancouver, Canada, to appear

2012

• M. Gašić, M. Henderson, B. Thomson, P. Tsiakoulis and S. Young. "Policy optimisation of POMDP-based dialogue systems without state space compression", IEEE SLT, Miami, Florida, PDF
• M. Gašić, P. Tsiakoulis, M. Henderson, B. Thomson, K. Yu, E. Tzirkel and S. Young. "The effect of cognitive load on a statistical dialogue system", Sigdial, Seoul, PDF

2011

• M. Gašić, F. Jurcicek, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. "On-line policy optimisation of spoken dialogue systems via live interaction with human subjects", ASRU,Hawaii, 2011. PDF
• L. Daubigney, M. Gašić, S. Chandramohan, M. Geist, O. Pietquin and S. Young. "Uncertainty management for on-line optimisation of a POMDP-based large-scale spoken dialogue system", Interspeech, Florence, Italy, 2011. PDF
• F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, M. Gašić, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. "Real user evaluation of spoken dialogue systems using Amazon Mechanical Turk", Interspeech, Florence, Italy, 2011. PDF

2010

• B. Thomson, F. Jurcicek, M. Gašić, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, K. Yu and S. Young. "Parameter learning for POMDP spoken dialogue models", SLT, Berkeley, California, 2010. PDF
• B. Thomson, K. Yu, S. Keizer, M. Gašić, F. Jurcicek, F. Mairesse and S. Young. "Bayesian dialogue system for the Let's Go spoken dialogue challenge", SLT, Berkeley, California, 2010. PDF
• M. Gašić, F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. "Gaussian Processes for Fast Policy Optimisation of POMDP-based Dialogue Managers", Sigdial, Tokyo, Japan, 2010. PDF, 64 KB
• S. Keizer, M. Gašić, F. Jurcicek, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. "Parameter estimation for agenda-based user simulation", Sigdial, Tokyo, Japan, 2010.
• F. Jurcicek, B. Thomson, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, M. Gašić, K. Yu and S. Young. "Natural Belief-Critic: a reinforcement algorithm for parameter estimation in statistical spoken dialogue systems", Interspeech, Makuhari, Japan, 2010. PDF, 399 KB
• F. Mairesse, M.Gašić, F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, J. Prombonas, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. "Phrase-based statistical language generation using graphical models and active learning", ACL, Uppsala, Sweden, 2010. PDF, 589 KB

2009

• M. Gašić, F. Lefevre, F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. "Back-off Action Selection in Summary Space-Based POMDP Dialogue Systems", ASRU, Merano, Italy, 2009. PDF, 421 KB
• F. Lefevre, M. Gašić, F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. "k-Nearest Neighbor Monte-Carlo Control Algorithm for POMDP-based Dialogue Systems", Sigdial, London, UK, 2009. PDF, 329KB
• F. Jurcicek, M. Gašić, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson and S. Young."Transformation-based Learning for Semantic Parsing", Interspeech, Brighton, UK, 2009. PDF, 158 KB
• K. Yu, T. Toda, M. Gašić, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson and S. Young. "Probabilistic Modelling of F0 in Unvoiced Regions in HMM-based Speech Synthesis" Int Conf Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Taipei, Taiwan, 2009. PDF, 195 KB

• F. Mairesse, M. Gašić, F. Jurcicek, S. Keizer, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. "Spoken Language Understanding from Unaligned Data using Discriminative Classification Models" Int Conf Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Taipei, Taiwan 2009. PDF, 163 KB

2008

• S. Keizer, M. Gašić, F. Mairesse, B. Thomson, K. Yu and S. Young. "Modelling user behaviour in the HIS-POMDP dialogue manager", SLT, Goa, India, 2008. PDF, 201 KB
• B. Thomson, K. Yu, M. Gašić, S. Keizer, F. Mairesse, J. Schatzmann and S. Young. "Evaluating semantic-level confidence scores with multiple hypotheses", Interspeech, Brisbane, Australia, 2008. PDF, 176 KB
• B. Thomson, M. Gašić, 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, Brisbane, Australia, 2008. PDF, 451 KB
• M. Gašić, 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

Technical reports

• M. Gašić and S. Young. "Gaussian processes for POMDP-based dialogue manager optimisation", CUED/F-INFENG/TR.684, Cambridge University Engineering Department, 2013, PDF
• M. Gašić and S. Young. "Effective Handling of Dialogue State in the Hidden Information State POMDP-based Dialogue Manager", CUED/F-INFENG/TR.650, Cambridge University Engineering Department, 2010, PDF, 814 KB

Talks

• Statistical Dialogue Optimisation, Inference and Control for Complex Dynamical Systems workshop, Centre for Complexity, University of Warwick, 2012. PPTX
• Tutorial on Statistical Spoken Dialogue Systems, Shanghai Jiao Tong Univeristy, Shanghai, China, 2012.
  • lecture 1: Spoken Dialogue Systems PPTX
  • lecture 2: Statistical Dialogue Modelling PPTX
  • lecture 3: Statistical Dialogue Policy Optimisation PPTX
• Statistical Dialogue Modelling, Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington, 2011. video
• Human-computer dialogue as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process, Computer Science Seminar, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Belgrade, Serbia, 2009. PPTX, 803 KB (in Serbian)
• Training and Evaluation of the HIS POMDP Dialogue System in Noise, Sigdial, Columbus, Ohio, 2008. PPT, 857 KB
• My talks in Cambridge

Posters

• Policy optimisation of POMDP-based dialogue systems without state space compression , SLT, Miami, 2012. PDF
• The effect of cognitive load on a statistical dialogue system , Sigdial, Seoul, 2012. PPTX
• On-line policy optimisation of spoken dialogue systems via live interaction with human subjects , ASRU, Hawaii, 2011. PDF
• Gaussian Processes for Fast Policy Optimisation of POMDP-based Dialogue Managers, Sigdial, Tokyo, Japan, 2010. PPTX, 3.3 MB
• Back-off Action Selection in Summary Space-Based POMDP Dialogue Systems, ASRU, Merano, Italy, 2009. PDF, 229 KB
• Hidden Information State System -- A Statistical Spoken Dialogue System, SLT, Goa, India, 2008. PPTX, 422 KB

Teaching

• Supervising 3M1 Mathematical Methods for 3nd year undergraduates at the Department of Engineering, Lent term 2013.

• Supervising 3F6 Software Engineering and Design for 3nd year undergraduates at the Department of Engineering, Lent term 2011, 2012 and 2013.

• Demonstrating 1B C++ Computing for 2nd year undergraduates at the Department of Engineering, Lent term 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Other professional activities

• Serving on the advisory committee for Dialog State Tracking Challenge 2012.
• Serving on the programme committee for MLIS, an ECAI Workshop on Machine Learning for Interactive Systems: Bridging the Gap among Language, Motor Control and Vision, Montpellier, France, 2012
• Serving on the advisory committee for Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems, Tokyo, Japan, 2010.
• Serving on the organising committee for Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems, London, UK, 2009.

Contact

Milica Gašić
Room BN3-011
Cambridge University Engineering Department
Trumpington Street
Cambridge CB2 1PZ
office: +44 1223 765 758
email: mg436 at the Cambridge academic domain