Chao Wang

Education

• Ph.D. Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, May 2001. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  Dissertation: Prosodic Modeling for Improved Speech Recognition and Understanding (advisor: Stephanie Seneff).
• M.S. Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, May 1997. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• B.S. Biomedical Engineering & Instrumentation, July 1994. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Honors and Awards

• Excellent Student Paper Acknowledgement, 5th EUROSPEECH Conference, 1997
• HST Fellowship Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995
• Dean's List, Tsinghua University, 1994
• Excellent Student Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 1990 - 1994

Research Experience

• June 2001 - Present: Research Scientist. CSAIL, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  Research and development of multi-lingual applications (conversational interfaces, computer-aided language learning systems) and enabling core technologies. Research activities include various aspects of speech and language processing in human-computer interactions, ranging from speech recognition to language understanding, generation, and translation.
• September 1997 - May 2001: Graduate Research Assistant. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  Completed a doctoral dissertation on modeling speech prosody to improve dialogue systems. Investigated a variety of ways of utilizing prosodic information to enhance speech recognition and understanding performance, for two languages that are of very different prosodic characteristics: Mandarin Chinese and English.
  Other projects: developed a novel hierarchical language model combining conventional n-gram models with recursive transition networks (RTNs); designed and implemented an automatic procedure to derive diphone classes, which improved accuracy and efficiency in acoustic model training; developed a Mandarin Chinese weather inquiry system providing on-line weather information using Mandarin speech.
• Summer 1997: Summer Intern. SpeechWorks International, Boston, Massachusetts
  Developed the first Mandarin Chinese core recognition engine for the company, including acoustic models, phonological rules and grammars. Implemented a Mandarin Chinese stock quote demo system showcasing the new technology.
• 1996 - 1997: Graduate Research Assistant. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  Completed a Master's thesis on extending the Galaxy multi-domain conversational system to support dialogue interactions in Mandarin Chinese. Developed speech recognition, language understanding and language generation components for Chinese. Improved the Galaxy system as a multi-lingual architecture for human-computer interaction.
• 1993 - 1994: Research Assistant. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
  Developed a prototype instrument for eliciting and measuring evoked brain potentials.

Teaching Experience

• 2003 - 2004: Thesis Supervisor. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  Co-supervising M. Eng. theses on various topics of language learning.
• Fall 2004: Guest Lecturer. Georgetown University, Washington, DC
  Gave a guest lecture on prosody in speech recognition and understanding in the course Processing of Speech (LING 566-01).
• Spring 2004: Guest Lecturer. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  Gave a guest lecture on prosody and discourse processing in the graduate course Computational Models of Discourse (6.892).
• Spring 1999: Teaching Assistant. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  Prepared homework/laboratory assignments and solutions, conducted laboratory sessions, maintained course webpage, handled student questions, and graded homeworks for the graduate course Automatic Speech Recognition (6.345).
• 1994 - 1995: Student Tutor. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  Provided one-on-one tutoring to undergraduate students on Circuits and Electronics (6.02), Signal and Systems (6.03), Probabilistic Systems Analysis (6.041/6.431), Physics (8.01, 8.02), Calculus (18.01), Linear Algebra (18.06)}.

Professional Activities

• Journal Article Reviews: Speech Communication, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, JASA.
• Conference Paper Reviews: HLT-NAACL 2004, ICSLP 2004, IJNLP 2005, EMNLP 2005.

Papers in Refereed Journals

1. The Influence of Social Affiliation on Individual Vocal Signatures of Northern Resident Killer Whales (Orcinus Orca), Anna E. Nousek, Peter J. B. Slater, Chao Wang, and Patrick J. O. Miller, Biology Letters 2006:2(4).
2. Automatic Induction of Language Model Data for A Spoken Dialogue System, Chao Wang, Grace Chung, and Stephanie Seneff, Special Issue of the Springer Journal on Language Resources and Evaluation 2006:40(1):25-46.
3. High-Quality Speech-to-Speech Translation for Computer-Aided Language Learning, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing 2006:3(2):1-21.
4. Statistical Modeling of Phonological Rules through Linguistic Hierarchies, Stephanie Seneff and Chao Wang, Speech Communication 2005:46(2):204-216.
5. Gene Prediction through Human/Mouse Ortholog Similarity Constraints, Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, and Christopher B. Burge, Applied Bioinformatics 2004:3(2-3):81-90.

Papers in Refereed Conferences and Workshops

1. A Spoken Translation Game for Second Language Learning, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, to appear in Proc. of AIED, 2007.
2. Automatic Assessment of Student Translations for Foreign Language Tutoring, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, to appear in Proc. of NAACL-HLT, 2007.
3. Exploiting Context Information in Spoken Dialogue Interaction with Mobile Devices, Stephanie Seneff, Mark Adler, James R. Glass, Brennan Sherry, Timothy J. Hazen, Chao Wang, and Tao Wu, to appear in Proc. of International Workshop on Imroved Mobile User Experience (IMUx), 2007.
4. High-quality Speech Translation in the Flight Domain, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, in Proc. of ICSLP, 2006.
5. Scalable and Portable Web-Based Multimodal Dialogue Interaction with Geographical Databases, Alex Gruenstein, Stephanie Seneff, and Chao Wang, in Proc. of ICSLP, 2006.
6. Combining Linguistic and Statistical Methods for Bi-directional English Chinese Translation in the Flight domain, Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, and John Lee, in Proc. of AMTA, 2006.
7. Language Model Data Filtering via User Simulation and Dialogue Resynthesis, Chao Wang, Stephanie Seneff, and Grace Chung, in Proc. of EUROSPEECH, 2005.
8. Context-Sensitive Statistical Language Modeling, Alexander Gruenstein, Chao Wang, and Stephanie Seneff, in Proc. of EUROSPEECH, 2005.
9. Automatic Induction of Language Model Data for a Spoken Dialogue System, Grace Chung, Stephanie Seneff, and Chao Wang, in Proc. of SIGDIAL, 2005.
10. Second Language Acquisition through Human Computer Dialogue, Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, Mitchell Peabody, and Victor Zue, in Proc. of the 4th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, 2004, Hong Kong, China.
11. An Interactive English Pronunciation Dictionary for Korean Learners, Jong-mi Kim, Chao Wang, Mitchell Peabody, and Stephanie Seneff, in Proc. of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2004, Jeju Island, Korea.
12. Combining Linguistic Knowledge and Acoustic Information in Automatic Pronunciation Lexicon Generation, Grace Chung, Chao Wang, Stephanie Seneff, Ed Filisko, and Min Tang, in Proc. of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2004, Jeju Island, Korea.
13. A Dynamic Vocabulary Spoken Dialogue Interface, Grace Chung, Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, and Lee Hetherington, in Proc. of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2004, Jeju Island, Korea.
14. High-quality Speech Translation for Language Learning, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, in InSTIL/ICALL Symposium: NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems, 2004, Venice, Italy.
15. SCILL: Spoken Conversational Interaction for Language Learning, Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, and Julia Zhang, in InSTIL/ICALL Symposium: NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems, 2004, Venice, Italy.
16. Mandarin Tone Acquisition through Typed Interactions, Mitchell Peabody, Stephanie Seneff, and Chao Wang, in InSTIL/ICALL Symposium: NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems, 2004, Venice, Italy.
17. Analysis and Processing of Lecture Audio Data: Preliminary Investigations, James Glass, T. J. Hazen, Lee Hetherington, and Chao Wang, in HLT-NAACL Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Speech Indexing and Retrieval, 2004, Boston, MA.
18. Improved Gene Prediction through Human/Mouse Ortholog Similarity Constraints, Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, and Chris Burge, in Proc. of Biological Language Computing, 2003, Pittsburgh, PA.
19. Automatic Induction of N-Gram Language Models from a Natural Language Grammar, Stephanie Seneff, Chao Wang, and T. J. Hazen, in Proc. of the 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, 2003, Geneva, Switzerland.
20. Empowering End Users to Personalize Dialogue Systems through Spoken Interaction, Stephanie Seneff, Grace Chung, and Chao Wang, in Proc. of the 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, 2003, Geneva, Switzerland.
21. Automatic Acquisition of Names Using Speak and Spell Mode in Spoken Dialogue Systems, Grace Chung, Stephanie Seneff and Chao Wang, in Proc. of HLT-NAACL, 2003, Edmonton, Canada.
22. Modeling Phonological Rules through Linguistic Hierarchies, Stephanie Seneff and Chao Wang, in Proc. of ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop Pronunciation Modeling and Lexicon Adaptation for Spoken Language, 2002, Estes Park, CO.
23. Prosodic Scoring of Recognition Outputs in the JUPITER Domain, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, in Proc. of 2001 ISCA Workshop on Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding, 2001, Red Bank, NJ.
24. Lexical Stress Modeling for Improved Speech Recognition of Spontaneous Telephone Speech in the JUPITER Domain, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, in Proc. of the 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, 2001, Aalborg, Denmark.
25. Voice Transformations: from Speech Synthesis to Mammalian Vocalizations, Min Tang, Chao Wang, and Stephanie Seneff, in Proc. of the 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, 2001, Aalborg, Denmark.
26. MUXING: a Telephone-access Mandarin Conversational System, Chao Wang, Scott Cyphers, Xiaolong Mou, Joe Polifroni, Stephanie Seneff, Jon Yi, and Victor Zue, in Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2000, Beijing, China.
27. Improved Tone Recognition by Normalizing for Coarticulation and Intonation Effects, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, in Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2000, Beijing, China.
28. Robust Pitch Tracking for Prosodic Modeling in Telephone Speech, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, in Proc. of the 2000 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000, Istanbul, Turkey.
29. A Study of Tones and Tempo in Continuous Mandarin Digit Strings and their Application in Telephone Quality Speech Recognition, Chao Wang and Stephanie Seneff, in Proc. of the 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 1998, Sydney, Australia.
30. YINHE: a Mandarin Chinese Version of the GALAXY System, Chao Wang, James Glass, Helen Meng, Joe Polifroni, Stephanie Seneff, and Victor Zue, in Proc. of the 5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, 1997, Rhodes, Greece.