Overview

       

The Cambridge Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) is a virtual institute that brings together researchers from Cambridge Assessment and the departments of Computer Science and Technology and Engineering. Using techniques from Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, ALTA's primary objective is to develop technology to enhance the experience of language learning and to develop cutting-edge approaches to automated assessment that will benefit learners and teachers worldwide. It forms part of Cambridge University's Language Sciences Interdisciplinary Research Center.

Sponsorship from Cambridge Assessment English supports a team of PhD students and post-doctoral researchers who investigate a range of topics, including:

• language assessment;
• teaching feedback;
• adaptive learning;
• content creation.

The institute comprises researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Technology (CST) and the Department of Engineering (CUED). The principal investigators, and research areas, are:

• Prof Ted Briscoe: Computational linguistics (CST)
• Dr Paula Buttery: (Director) Corpus linguistics (CST)
• Prof Mark Gales: Speech processing (CUED)
• Dr Andrew Rice: Adaptive systems and platforms (CST)

The research in the CUED Speech Group is focused on spoken language assessment and learning. The group works on all aspects of this area from core speech recognition and machine learning, to spoken language assessment, to feedback and the nature of the test.

Personnel Associated with ALTA @CUED

• Prof Mark Gales [Principal Investigator]
• Dr Kate Knill [Senior Research Associate]
• Dr Yu Wang [Research Associate]
• Dr Linlin Wang [Research Associate]
• Andrey Malinin [Research Student (part funded)]
• Kostas Kyriakopoulos [Research Student]
• Yiting (Edie) Lu [Research Student]
• Potsawee Manakul [UROP/UGrad student]

Former members:

• Karl Bates [UGrad student]
• Dr Jeff Chen [Research Associate]
• Dr Rogier van Dalen [Research Associate]
• Shixiang Gu [Research Student (part funded)]
• Prof D. Littman [Visitor]
• Hanxu (Vicky) Lu [UROP/UGrad student]
• Bruno Mlodozeniec [UROP student]
• Zhi Chen Neo [UROP student]
• Preben Ness [UROP student]
• Junjie Pan [MPhil student]
• Sebastian Popescu [MPhil student]
• Dr Anton Ragni [Research Associate]
• Mohammad Rashid [MPhil student]
• Marco del Vecchio [MPhil student]
• Yisheng (Darren) Xu [UGrad student]

Assessment Systems and Infrastructure

• M. Del Vecchio, A. Malinin, M.J.F. Gales (2018)
  Improved auto-marking confidence for spoken language assessment
  SLT 2018
• Y. Wang, M.J.F. Gales, K.M Knill, K. Kyriakopoulos, A. Malinin, R.C. van Dalen, M. Rashid (2017)
  Towards Automatic Assessment of Spontaneous Spoken English
  Speech Communication, Sept 2018. (Final accepted)
• K.M. Knill, M.J.F. Gales, K. Kyriapolous, A. Ragni, Y. Wang (2017)
  Use of Graphemic Lexicons for Spoken Language Assessment
  INTERSPEECH 2017
• A. Malinin, A. Ragni, M.J.F. Gales, K.M. Knill (2017)
  Incorporating Uncertainty into Deep Learning for spoken language assessment
  ACL 2017
• D.Litman, S.Young, M. Gales, K. Knill, K. Ottewell, R. van Dalen and D. Vandyke (2016)
  Towards Using Conversations with Spoken Dialogue Systems in the Automated Assessment of Non-Native Speakers of English
  SIGDIAL, 2016.
• R.C. van Dalen, K.M. Knill, M.J.F. Gales (2015)
  Automatically Grading Learners' English Using a Gaussian Process
  SLaTE Workshop 2015
• R.C. van Dalen, K.M. Knill, P. Tsiakoulis, M.J.F. Gales (2015)
  Improving Multiple Crowd-sourced Transcriptions Using a Speech Recogniser
  ICASSP 2015

• Y. Wang, J.H.M. Wong, M.J.F.Gales, K.M. Knill, A. Ragni (2018)
  Sequence Teacher-Student Training of Acoustic Models for Automatic Free Speaking Language Assessment
  SLT 2018
• A. Ragni, Q. Li, M.J.F. Gales, Y. Wang (2018)
  Confidence Estimation and Deletion Prediction Using Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks
  SLT 2018
• Y. Wang, C. Zhang, M. J. F. Gales, P. C. Woodland (2018)
  Speaker Adaptation and Adaptive Training for Jointly Optimised Tandem Systems
  INTERSPEECH 2018
• Y. Wang, X. Chen, M. J. F. Gales, A. Ragni and J. H. M. Wong (2018)
  Phonetic and graphemic systems for multi-genre broadcast trancription
  ICASSP 2018
• X. Chen, X.Liu, A. Ragni, Y. Wang, M.J.F. Gales (2017)
  Future Word Contexts in Neural Network Language Models
  ASRU 2017
• X. Chen, A. Ragni, X. Liu, M.J.F. Gales (2017)
  Investigating Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network Language Models for Speech Recognition
  INTERSPEECH 2017

• A. Malinin, K. M. Knill, M.J.F. Gales (2017)
  A hierarchical attention based model for off-topic spontaneous spoken response detection
  ASRU 2017
• A. Malinin, K.M. Knill, A. Ragni, Y. Wang, M.J.F. Gales (2017)
  An attention based model for off-topic spontaneous spoken response detection: An Initial Study
  SLaTE Workshop 2017
• A. Malinin, R.C. van Dalen, Y. Wang, M.J.F. Gales, K.M. Knill (2016)
  Off-topic Response Detection for Spontaneous Spoken English Assessment
  ACL 2016

Feedback (Pronunciation and Grammar)

• K. Kyriakopoulos, K.M. Knill, M.J.F. Gales (2018)
  A deep learning approach to assessing non-native pronunciation of English using phone distances
  INTERSPEECH 2018
• K.M. Knill, M.J.F. Gales, K. Kyriakopoulos, A. Malinin, A. Ragni, Y. Wang, A.P. Caines (2018)
  Impact of ASR Performance on Free Speaking Language Assessment
  INTERSPEECH 2018
• K. Kyriakopoulos, K.M. Knill, M.J.F. Gales (2017)
  Automatic characterisation of the pronunciation of non-native English speakers using phone distance features
  SLaTE Workshop 2017

• A. Malinin, M.J.F. Gales (2018)
  Predictive Uncertainty Estimation via Prior Networks
  arXiv Preprint 2018 (revised version accepted for NIPS 2018)
• Nilesh Tripuraneni, Shixiang Gu, Hong Ge, Zoubin Ghahramani (2015)
  Particle Gibbs for Infinite Hidden Markov Models
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2015.
• Shixiang Gu, Zoubin Ghahramani, Richard E. Turner (2015)
  Neural Adaptive Sequential Monte Carlo
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2015.