Matthew Henderson

Statistical Dialogue Systems PhD Student, University of Cambridge

My research is in statistical methods for Spoken Dialogue Systems, i.e. computer systems with which you can have a conversation. After completing my BA in Mathematics at Cambridge, I obtained an MSc in Speech and Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh, with Colin Matheson supervising my dissertation. Now I am working for a PhD in Cambridge under the supervision of Steve Young in the CUED Dialogue Systems Group.

I have helped develop a couple of online demos for our Restaurant Information dialogue systems. You can call the system using a flash plugin at the group's demo page. There is also a general overview of the BUDS POMDP Dialogue System as it was presented at the NIPS 2012 demo session.

You may read an overview of my research interests as was presented at the Young Researchers Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems in July 2012. [I am on the organising committee for YRRSDS 2013 in Metz.]

Publications

First Author:

• Discriminative Spoken Language Understanding Using Word Confusion Networks

  

  Presents a new form of semantic decoding which uses the entire distribution of speech recognition hypotheses to infer the meaning of an utterance. This was presented as a poster at SLT. The dataset used for training the decoder and for the offline evaluation is freely available: In Car SLU Corpus. Matthew Henderson, Milica Gašić, Blaise Thomson, Pirros Tsiakoulis, Kai Yu and Steve Young IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT), 2012, Miami View PDF Bibtex citation @inproceedings{Henderson2012a, author = {Henderson, Matthew and Ga\v{s}i\'{c}, Milica and Thomson, Blaise and Tsiakoulis, Pirros and Yu, Kai and Young, Steve}, booktitle = {Spoken Language Technology Workshop, 2012. IEEE}, title = {{Discriminative Spoken Language Understanding Using Word Confusion Networks}}, year = {2012} }

• Recovering from Non-Understanding Errors in a Conversational Dialogue System

  

  A paper stemming from work done in my MSc evaluating a set of strategies a conversational (rather than task-oriented) dialogue system can use to recover from situations where it is unable to understand what the user has asked. The dialogue system concerned is for a robot tourguide which shows visitors around the Edinburgh Informatics Forum. This was an oral presentation at Semdial, and you may view the slides. Matthew Henderson, Colin Matheson and Jon Oberlander Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial), 2012, Paris. View PDF Bibtex citation @inproceedings{Henderson2012a, author = {Henderson, Matthew and Matheson, Colin and Oberlander, Jon}, booktitle = {Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue}, title = {{Recovering from Non-Understanding Errors in a Conversational Dialogue System}}, year = {2012} }

Non-first Author:

• N-Best Error Simulation for Training Spoken Dialogue Systems

  Blaise Thomson, Milica Gašić, Matthew Henderson, Pirros Tsiakoulis and Steve Young IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT), 2012, Miami Bibtex citation @inproceedings{Thomson2012, author = {Thomson, Blaise and Ga\v{s}i\'{c}, Milica and Henderson, Matthew and Tsiakoulis, Pirros and Young, Steve}, booktitle = {Spoken Language Technology Workshop, 2012. IEEE}, title = {{N-Best Error Simulation for Training Spoken Dialogue Systems}}, year = {2012} }

• Policy Optimisation of POMDP-based Dialogue Systems Without State Space Compression

  Milica Gašić, Matthew Henderson, Blaise Thomson, Pirros Tsiakoulis and Steve Young IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT), 2012, Miami View PDF Bibtex citation @inproceedings{Gasic2012b, author = { Ga\v{s}i\'{c}, Milica and Henderson, Matthew and Thomson, Blaise and Tsiakoulis, Pirros and Young, Steve}, booktitle = {Spoken Language Technology Workshop, 2012. IEEE}, title = {{Policy optimisation of POMDP-based dialogue systems without state space compression}}, year = {2012} }

• The Effect of Cognitive Load on a Statistical Dialogue System

  Milica Gašić, Pirros Tsiakoulis, Matthew Henderson, Blaise Thomson, Kai Yu, Eli Tzirkel and Steve Young Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial), 2012, Seoul. View PDF Bibtex citation @inproceedings{Gasic2012a, author = { Ga\v{s}i\'{c}, M. and Tsiakoulis, P. and Henderson, M. and Thomson, B. and Yu, K. and Tzirkel, E. and Young, S. J.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of SIGdial}, title = {{The effect of cognitive load on a statistical dialogue system}}, year = {2012} }

• Statistical Methods for Building Robust Spoken Dialogue Systems in an Automobile

  Pirros Tsiakoulis, Milica Gašić, Matthew Henderson, Jorge Prombonas, Blaise Thomson, Kai Yu, Steve Young, and Eli Tzirkel International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE), 2012, San Francisco. View PDF Bibtex citation @INPROCEEDINGS{Tsiakoulis2012, TITLE = "Statistical Methods for Building Robust Spoken Dialogue Systems in an Automobile", AUTHOR = "Tsiakoulis, P. and Ga\v{s}i\'{c}, M. and Henderson, M. and Prombonas, J. and Thomson, B. and Yu, K. and Young, S. J. and Tzirkel, E.", YEAR = {2012}, BOOKTITLE = "4th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics" }