Hauptvorträge

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Anna Kruspe, Hochschule München

The keynote addresses the challenges and advancements in speech recognition for singing, a domain distinctly different from standard speech recognition. Singing encompasses unique challenges, including extensive pitch variations, diverse vocal styles, and background music interference. We explore key areas such as phoneme recognition, language identification in songs, keyword spotting, and full lyrics transcription. I will describe some of my own experiences when performing research on these tasks just as they were starting to gain traction, but will also show how recent developments in deep learning and large-scale datasets have propelled progress in this field. My goal is to illuminate the complexities of applying speech recognition to singing, evaluate current capabilities, and outline future research directions.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hendrik Buschmeier, Universität Bielefeld

Politeness is a (not only) linguistic phenomenon in human social interaction that manifests itself in seemingly subtle influences on the formulation of utterances and plays an important role in managing of rapport and thus is crucial for communication. However, it is unclear whether and how the use of polite language transfers to interactions with artificial conversational agents such as voice assistants or social robots. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people use formulaic expression that are considered polite (such as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’) when speaking to voice assistants, and raised concerns when this was not reciprocated. In this talk, I will present politeness as a phenomenon that is much richer than formulaic speech, and talk about our own research on a computational model of politeness for conversational agents, empirical studies on factors influencing politeness in human-robot interaction, human use of indirect politeness in human-robot interaction, and a qualitative investigation of differences in influences on and expectations of politeness in human and human-agent interaction.