Guest speaker: Ewan Dunbar (Université de Paris Diderot)

The Department of French is hosting a talk by Ewan Dunbar. After finishing our department's BA (2007) and MA (2008) programs, Ewan earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2013. He is now a maître de conférences (Assistant Professor) at l'Université de Paris - Paris Diderot (Paris 7), where his research focuses on computational approaches to learning and perception, especially on the phonological level. His talk is taking place on Monday, February 24, at 3 PM, in 201 Odette Hall on St. Joseph Street: "Un jour, Google, tu deviendras un vrai garçon" ("Someday, Google, you'll be a real boy"). Note that the language of the talk is French.

(We increasingly speak to our computers, smartphones, and digital assistants. In many cases, these devices understand us perfectly. But it doesn't take long to realise that that our devices don't perceive speech the same way human beings do: they can make offbeat errors even under relatively normal listening conditions. Understanding the processes and representations involved in human speech perception is one of the primary goals of phonetics and phonology. I will show how we have approached fundamental questions for speech sciences through the use of reverse-engineering methods, as we attempt to ensure that the technology underlying our digital assistants behaves exactly the same way as human speech perception does. As an example, I describe our initial progress towards developing a teaching tool able to suggest targeted interventions for improving pronunciation in a second language – an application that needs to model and predict the likely difficulties that speakers of a given L1 will have when learning a given L2. I present experimental results gathered in English and French and compare the behaviour of our current models with that of human participants. I show how this work is integrated into a larger research program of modelling human speech perception, and the implications of such models for the speech-based technology that we interact with more and more in daily life.)