Frédéric Béchet

Contact: frederic.bechet [à] univ-amu.fr

Version française

Professor of Computer Science at the Aix Marseille Université

Researcher in Natural Language Processing - Laboratoire Informatique et Systèmes - LIS UMR 7020

Career

Frédéric Béchet is a researcher in the field of Speech and Natural Language Processing. His research activities are mainly focused on Spoken Language Understanding for both Spoken Dialogue Systems and Speech Mining applications. After studying Computer Science at the University of Marseille, he obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 1994 from the University of Avignon, France. Since then he worked at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, as a Professor Assistant at the University of Avignon, as an invited professor at ATT Research Shannon Lab in Florham Park, New Jersey.

Frédéric Béchet is currently a full Professor of Computer Science at the Aix Marseille University, and a member of the Natural Language Processing research group of the Laboratoire Informatique et Systèmes - LIS UMR 7020.

Frédéric Béchet is the author/co-author of over 100 refereed papers in journals and international conferences and hold two patents. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letter since 2012, has served on the reviewing committees of several international conferences (ICASSP, Interspeech, ASRU, HLT, EMNLP) and has been an invited reviewer for several journals including : Speech Communication, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Traitement Automatique des Langues.

Frédéric Béchet was an elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee and is currently vice-president of the board of the French Natural Language Processing association ATALA.

Frédéric Béchet has been involved in many French and European research programs in the fields of Speech Processing and Spoken Dialog Systems : FP5 SMADA STREP, FP6 LUNA STREP, FP6 PASCAL NoE, ANR EPAC, ANR SEQUOIA, ANR EDYLEX, ANR DECODA, ANR PERCOL, ANR ASFALDA, ANR ORFEO, ANR DATCHA. He was the Coordinator of several French programs such as PERCOL, DECODA and DATCHA, as well as Principal Investigator for the Aix Marseille University for a US DARPA funded project (BOLT 2012-2015).

In terms of managerial activities, Frédéric Béchet is currently director of the LIS research departement: Laboratoire Informatique et Systèmes - LIS UMR 7020.

Research activities

My research activities are mainly focused on automatic language processing models for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). By dealing with spoken language, I’m working at the crossing of Natural Language Processing (NLP) on one hand and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) on the other hand.

The main research topics that I studied during my academic career are :

• Language modeling for speech processing (recognition and synthesis) ;
• Spoken Language Understanding ;
• Spoken Dialog systems ;
• Robust syntactic/semantic parsing.

These topics have been studied through three applicative frameworks: automatic spoken dialog systems; speech analytics ; linguistic processing of non-canonical texts. One focus of my work is to combine academic research to applicative frameworks defined through collaborative projects with industrial partners. These projects are a unique opportunity to work on large "realistic" datasets in order to develop and evaluate new language processing models. These models are mostly corpus-based models with various machine learning methods integrating linguistically motivated ressources.

Recent publications

• Spoken Language Processing and Understanding
• Jeremie Tafforeau and Frederic Bechet and Thierry Artiere and Benoit Favre Joint syntactic and semantic analysis with a multitask Deep Learning Framework for Spoken Language Understanding Interspeech, San Francisco (USA) September ( 2016 ) PDF
• Frederic Bechet and Benoit Favre and Mickael Rouvier Speech is silver, but silence is golden: improving speech-to-speech translation performance by slashing users input Interspeech ( 2015 ) PDF
• Alexis Nasr and Frederic Bechet and Benoit Favre and Thierry Bazillon and Jose Deulofeu and Andre Valli Automatically enriching spoken corpora with syntactic information for linguistic studies LREC ( 2014 ) PDF
• Frederic Bechet and Benoit Favre and Alexis Nasr and Mathieu Morey Retrieving the syntactic structure of erroneous ASR transcriptions for, open-domain Spoken Language Understanding ICASSP2014 - Speech and Language Processing (ICASSP2014 - SLTC) ( 2014 ) Florence, Italy PDF
• Conversation analysis
• Jérémy Trione and Benoit Favre and Frédéric Béchet Beyond utterance extraction: summary recombination for speech summarization Interspeech, San Francisco (USA) September ( 2016 ) PDF
• G. Riccardi and F. Bechet and M. Danieli and B. Favre and R. Gaizauskas and U. Kruschwitz and M. Poesio The SENSEI Project: Making Sense of Human Conversations J.F. Quesada et al. Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence Pages : 10-33 Volume : LNAI 9577 April ( 2016 ) PDF

Research Projects