Ondřej Dušek
Main Research Interests
- Natural language generation
- Spoken dialogue systems and chatbots
- Evaluation methods for NLG/dialogue/NLP
- Machine learning
- Machine translation
Projects
Current
- NaMuDDiS – Natural Multi-domain Dialogue Systems (Charles University funded, 2019-2021)
- THEaiTRE – Automatically generating a theatre play (Czech Technical Agency, 2020-2022)
- EDUbot – Education chatbot assistant (Czech Technical Agency, 2021-2023)
Past
- METOD – dialogue management (industry cooperation with Agnostix co-funded by City of Prague, 2020)
At Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh (2016-2018):
- DILiGENt – natural language generation
- MaDrIgAL – spoken dialogue systems
- Alexa Prize Challenge – chatbots (Alana – 2x finalist team, 2x 3rd place)
During my Ph.D. study (2011-2016):
- AdaNLG – adaptive natural language generator (2014-2016)
- Vystadial – statistical spoken dialogue system (2013-2016)
- QTLeap – semantic machine translation (2013-2016)
- Khresmoi – medical information retrieval (working on machine translation, 2013-2014)
- FAUST – improving machine translation fluency (2011-2013)
Teaching
List of classesNPFL099 Statistical dialogue systemsNPFL123 Dialogue systems
Students
Students I supervise:
- Vojtěch Hudeček (Ph.D. at Charles Uni, with Zdeněk Žabokrtský, since 2018)
- Zdeněk Kasner (Ph.D. at Charles Uni since 2019)
- Jonáš Kulhánek (MSc. at Charles Uni since 2020)
- Sourabrata Mukherjee (Ph.D. at Charles Uni since 2019)
- Tomáš Nekvinda (completed MSc. at Charles Uni, 2019–2020; Ph.D. since 2020)
- Patrícia Schmidtová (completed BSc. at Charles Uni, with Vojtěch Hudeček, 2018–2019; MSc. since 2020)
- Daniel Štancl (Ph.D. at Charles Uni since 2020)
- Xinnuo Xu (Ph.D., CDT Robotics Edinburgh, with Verena Rieser & Ioannis Konstas, since 2016)
My former students:
- Shubham Agarwal (Ph.D. at Heriot-Watt, with Verena Rieser & Ioannis Konstas, 2017-2019)
- Ondřej Měkota (MSc. at Charles Uni, 2020)
- Jan Vainer (completed MSc. at Charles Uni, 2019–2020)
News
2021/04/26: The EDUbot project (education chatbot) funded by the Czech Technical Agency has started. We'll add more news soon.
2021/03/02: We started the 2021 run of the Dialogue Systems course.
2021/02/26: The THEaiTRE project has had the premiere of the first AI-generated play on stage!
2021/01/08: Jan Vainer won the Dean's Award for Best Master's Thesis with his work on efficient neural speech synthesis!
2020/12/17: The paper Evaluating data-to-text NLG accuracy by natural language inference by me & Zdeněk kasner has received the INLG 2020 Best Short Paper award!
2020/11/21: Two INLG 2020 papers by Zdeněk Kasner & me are now out on arXiv: Data-to-text generation by iterative text editing and Evaluating data-to-text NLG accuracy by natural language inference.
2020/11/16: The list of accepted papers and a preliminary schedule for the NLG Evaluation Workshop I'm co-organizing at INLG 2020 is now available.
2020/09/29: The Statistical Dialogue Systems course I'm teaching with Vojtěch Hudeček has started its 2020/2021 run.
2020/07/25: We got two papers on neural text-to-speech accepted to Interspeech, both are available on arXiv: Tomáš Nekvinda's One Model, Many Languages: Meta-learning for Multilingual Text-to-Speech and Jan Vainer's SpeedySpeech: Efficient Neural Speech Synthesis.
2020/07/01: Me & Vojtěch started working on a joint project METOD with Agnostix, investigating dialogue management modelling and visualizations, supported by the City of Prague.
2020/05/26: We (Jindřich Libovický, Zdeněk Kasner, Jindřich Helcl & me) took part in the STAPLE/Duolingo translation & paraphrasing WNGT shared task. Our report is now in the ACL anthology.
2020/04/06: Our paper “Fact-based Content Weighting for Evaluating Abstractive Summarisation” (by Xinnuo Xu, me, Jingiy Li, Yannis Konstas & Verena Rieser) was accepted for ACL. You can read the paper in the ACL anthology.
2020/04/01: Our grant project THEaiTRE for automatically generating theatre plays was accepted by the Czech Technical Agency (and actually got the highest ranking of all submissions)! We plan to have a theatre play performed in January 2021, for the 100th anniversary of Karel Čapek's R.U.R.
2020/03/23: Verena Rieser and I were guests at the NLP Highlights podcast, and we talked about data-to-text generation. You can listen to the podcast on Soundcloud.
2020/03/03: I gave a short talk at the Czechbots chatbot meetup. You can find the slides here.
Biographical
- My CV
- List of publications (incl. talks)
Tools I'm participating on
- Alex – spoken dialogue system framework
- Flect – statistical morphology generation
- MTMonkey – machine translation web services infrastructure
- RatPred – trainable NLG quality estimation
- TGen – a statistical natural language generator
- Treex – a modular NLP toolkit