Ethan O. Selfridge

I am a fifth year PhD Student at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).

I will be starting at AT&T Labs - Research in the Fall.

My (somewhat) current CV is available here.

CSLU-OHSU
20000 NW Walker
Beaverton, OR, 97006

e-mail: selfridg[the usual]ohsu.edu

Education

PhD: Computer Science and Engineering... OHSU Expected 2013

BA: Psychology... Reed College, 2006
Undergradaute Thesis: The Role of State-Anxiety in Cognitive Dissonance Induced Attitude Change

Research Interests

Focus: reinforcement learning, dialogue, turn-taking, incremental processing, artificial intelligence

My research surrounds the use of reinforcement learning for dialogue systems, in particular learning statistical policies for non-utterance system behavior. Currently I am focused on developing an RL framework where the system learns both what to say and when to say it. Towards this end, the system must be able to process and reason on user utterances in progress. This goal has resulted in research in Incremental Speech Recognition and temporally relevant simulations.

PhD Advisor: Prof. Peter Heeman

Publications

Ethan O. Selfridge, Peter A. Heeman, Iker Arizmendi, and Jason D. Willams (2012): Demonstrating the Incremental Intreaction Manager in an end-to-end "Lets Go!" dialogue system in Demonstration at IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT), SLT 2012, Miami, FL, December 2012

Peter A. Heeman, Jordan Frye, Rebecca Lunsford, Andrew Rueckert, and Ethan O. Selfridge (2012): Using Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Management Policies: Towards Understanding MDP Violations and Convergence , InterSpeech 20102, Portland, OR, USA

Ethan O. Selfridge, Iker Arizmendi, Peter A. Heeman, and Jason D. Williams (2012): Integrating Incremental Speech Recognition and POMDP-based Dialogue Systems , SIGdial 2012, Seoul, South Korea

Ethan O. Selfridge and Peter A. Heeman (2012): A Temporal Simulator for Developing Turn-Taking Methods for Spoken Dialogue Systems , SIGdial 2012, South Korea

Ethan O. Selfridge and Peter A. Heeman (2011): Learning Turn, Attention and Utterance Decisions in a Negotiative Slot-Filling Domain Technical Report CSLU-11-005, Center for Spoken Language Understanding, OHSU, October 2011

Ethan O. Selfridge, Iker Arizmendi, Peter A. Heeman, and Jason D. Williams (2011): Stability and Accuracy in Incremental Speech Recognition In Proceedings of the 12th Annual SIGdial Meetinig On Discourse and Dialogue, Portland, OR, June 2011. (Best Student Paper Award)

Peter A. Heeman, Rebecca Lunsford, Ethan O. Selfridge, Lois Black, and Jan van Santenn (2010): Autism and Interactional Aspects of Dialogue. SIGdial 2010, Tokyo, September 2010

Ethan O. Selfridge and Peter A. Heeman (2010): Importance-Driven Turn-Bidding for Spoken Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 177-185, Uppsala Sweden, July 2010.

Ethan O. Selfridge and Peter A. Heeman (2009): A bidding approach to turn-taking. Presented at the International Workshop for Spoken Dialogue Systems

Work Experience

Summer 2011: Internship at AT&T Shannon Labs: "Turn-taking for dialogue systems"
With Jason D. Williams

Summer 2010: Internship at AT&T Shannon Labs: "Turn-taking for dialogue systems"
With Jason D. Williams and Suhrid Balakrishnan

Winter 2006 - Fall 2008: Precision Training Software
Knowledge Engineer/Developer

Misc.

Incremental Dialogue View

Patent Pending (AT&T): INCREMENTAL SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR DIALOG SYTEMS

Patent Number 20130060570: SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ADVANCED TURN-TAKING FOR INTERACTIVE SPOKEN DIALOG SYSTEMS

Professional Activities

  • Presented at NW-NLP 2012: a temporal simulator for developing turn-taking methods for Spoken Dialogue Systems
  • Organizing Committee Member: Young Researchers Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRRSDS) 2011
  • Local Arrangements Committee Member: SIGdial 2011
  • Co-Chair: Student Session at ACL 2011
  • Program Committee: IJCAI 2011
  • Presented at NW-NLP Workshop 2010 : Importance-Driven Turn-Bidding for Spoken Dialogue Systems
  • Reviewed for NW-NLP Workshop 2010