Ondřej Dušek
Main Research Interests
- Natural language generation
- Spoken dialogue systems and chatbots
- Machine learning
- Machine translation
Projects
Current
- THEaiTRE – Automatically generating a theatre play (Czech Technical Agency, 2020-2022)
- NaMuDDiS – Natural Multi-domain Dialogue Systems (Charles University funded, 2019-2021)
- METOD – dialogue management (industry cooperation with Agnostix co-funded by City of Prague, 2020)
Past
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 co-supervise and co-supervised:
- Shubham Agarwal (Ph.D. at Heriot-Watt, with Verena Rieser & Ioannis Konstas, 2017-2019)
- 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)
- Ondřej Měkota (MSc. at Charles Uni, 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)
- Jan Vainer (completed MSc. at Charles Uni, 2019–2020)
- Xinnuo Xu (Ph.D., CDT robotics, with Verena Rieser & Ioannis Konstas, since 2016)
News
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.
2020/02/18: Our undergrad Dialogue systems course started its 2020 run – lecture slides will appear on the course webpage.
2019/10/31: I presented 3 papers at INLG 2019: Neural Generation for Czech: Data and Baselines (work with Filip Jurčíček), Semantic Noise Matters for Neural Natural Language Generation (work with Dave Howcroft and Verena Rieser), and Automatic Quality Estimation for Natural Language Generation: Ranting (Jointly Rating and Ranking) (work with Karin Sevegnani, Ioannis Konstas and Verena Rieser).
2019/10/03: We started teaching a new course on Statistical dialogue systems – lecture slides will appear on the course webpage.
2019/09/13: Our paper User evaluation of a multi-dimensional statistical dialogue system (with Simon Keizer, Xingkun Liu and Verena Rieser) was presented at SIGDIAL in Stockholm and is now online on arXiv.
2019/07/10: Our paper analyzing the E2E NLG Challenge results is now published in Computer Speech and Language and available online as open access.
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