Professor Steve Young

Interests

My primary interest is in adaptive learning in spoken dialogue systems. This currently involves modelling human machine dialogues using the framework of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). The research issues addressed include user simulation to drive reinforcement learning, scaling POMDPs to make them tractable in real-world problems, tight integration of ASR and semantic decoding to provide noise robustness and rapid on-line adaptation. In the future, it is hoped to further investigate the behaviours learnt by these systems and how they relate to and differ from observed human behaviours.

Research Focus

Equipment

Computational modelling