Thank you to the following supporters of ICASSP 2007
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology
This talk surveys the past 50 years of automatic speech recognition (ASR) research, and suggests where we should focus our energies in the future. The history of ASR research is segmented into five periods: pre-history (before 1952), 1st generation (1952-1968), 2nd generation (1968-1980), 3rd generation (1980-1990), and the current 3.5th generation (1990-now). The transitions from one generation to the next are interestingly synchronized with advances in computer (IT) technology. The fundamentals of current state-of-the-art ASR technology were established during the 3rd generation period, during which the number of ICASSP papers on ASR rapidly increased. In 1986, for the first time, ASR papers represented a majority of all speech-related papers, and this has remained true for every year since. Starting with the transition to the 2nd generation period, the numbers of papers on ASR from the US and Japan have been consistently larger than any other countries. However, in the last 10 years, the number of papers originating from other countries, particularly China, has been significantly increasing. Although ASR technology has made remarkable progress over the last 50 years, there still exist a large number of problems that need to be solved.
Sadaoki Furui received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in
mathematical engineering and instrumentation physics from Tokyo University,
Tokyo, Japan in 1968, 1970, and 1978, respectively. He joined the Electrical
Communications Laboratories of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Corporation
in 1970, and later served as a Research Fellow and the Director of the Furui
Research Laboratory at NTT Human Interface Laboratories, from 1991 to 1997. He
is currently a Professor of the Department of Computer Science, Graduate School
of Information Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is
also a Vice Dean of the Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering.
His research interests include analysis of speaker characterization information
in speech waves and its application to speaker recognition as well as
interspeaker normalization and adaptation in speech recognition. He is also
interested in vector-quantization-based speech recognition algorithms, spectral
dynamic features for speech recognition, speech recognition algorithms that are
robust against noise and distortion, algorithms for Japanese large-vocabulary
continuous-speech recognition, automatic speech summarization algorithms,
multimodal human-computer interaction systems, automatic question-answering
systems, and analysis of the speech perception mechanism. He has authored or
coauthored over 700 published articles. From December 1978 to December 1979,
he served on the staff of the Acoustics Research Department of Bell
Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, as a visiting researcher working on
speaker verification. Dr. Furui is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Acoustical
Society of America and the Institute of Electronics, Information and
Communication Engineers of Japan (IEICE). He served as President of the
Permanent Council of International Conferences on Spoken Language Processing
(PC-ICSLP) from 2000 to 2004, the International Speech Communication
Association (ISCA) from 2001 to 2005, and the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ)
from 2001 to 2003. He served on the IEEE Technical Committees on Speech as
well as Multimedia Signal Processing, and the Technical Program Committees of
ICASSP86 in Tokyo as well as ICSLP90 in Kobe. He served on ICSLP94 in Yokohama
as Vice Chairman of the Conference Committee. He has organized various
international conferences and workshops including the 1997 IEEE Workshop on
Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding. He has also served on several
international advisory boards in the US and Europe. He served as a Board
member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society from 2001 to 2003. He served as
an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Speech Communication from 1997 to 2001,
Chief Editor of the Journal of the ASJ from 1997 to 1999, and Chief Editor of
the English Journal of IEICE from 2001 to 2003. He also served as an IEEE
Press Editorial Board member from 1995 to 1999. He is now serving as an
Editorial Board member of the Journal of Computer Speech and Language and the
Journal of Speech Communication. He is also serving as a Board member of the
IEICE. He supervised the five-year Japanese Science and Technology Agency
Priority Program entitled “Spontaneous Speech: Corpus and Processing
Technology” from 1999 to 2004. He has supervised the 21st Century Center of
Excellence (COE) Program entitled “Framework for Systematization and
Application of Large-scale Knowledge Resources” since its inception in 2003. He
received the Yonezawa Prize and the Paper Award from the IEICE in 1975, 1988,
1993 and 2003, and the Sato Paper Award from the ASJ in 1985 and 1987. He
received the Senior Award from the IEEE ASSP Society and the Achievement Award
from the Minister of Science and Technology, both in 1989. He received the
Book Award from the IEICE in 1990 and the Technical Achievement Award from the
IEICE in 2003. He received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Award, the
Achievement Award from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and
Technology, and the Purple Ribbon Medal from Japanese Emperor in 2006. He also
received the Mira Paul Memorial Award from the AFECT, India in 2001. He was a
Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society from 1993 to 1994.
He is the author of “Digital Speech Processing, Synthesis, and Recognition”
(Marcel Dekker, 1989, revised in 2000) in English, “Digital Speech Processing”
(Tokai University Press, 1985) in Japanese, "Acoustics and Speech Processing"
(Kindai-Kagaku-Sha, 1992, revised in 2006) in Japanese, and “Speech Information
Processing” (Morikita, 1998) in Japanese. He has co-authored “Image and Speech
Processing Technology” (Denpa-Shinbun-Sha, 2004) in Japanese. He has edited
“Advances in Speech Signal Processing” (Marcel Dekker, 1992) jointly with Dr.
M.M. Sondhi. He has translated into Japanese “Fundamentals of Speech
Recognition,” authored by Drs. L.R. Rabiner and B.-H. Juang (NTT Advanced
Technology, 1995) and “Vector Quantization and Signal Compression,” authored by
Drs. A. Gersho and R. M. Gray (Corona-sha, 1998)