HLT@INESC-ID

I obtained the industrial engineering degree with specialization electronics in automatic regulation at the Escuela Politecnica Superior de Ingenieria de Gijon (Spain) in 2005, completing the last year and final thesis of this degree with an Erasmus scholarship at the Technische Universität Berlin. In 2006 I worked as an intern at Peiker Acustic researching model-based speech enhancement. On this same year I was awarded with a La Caixa and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship for research towards the Ph.D. degree at the EMSP department of the Technische Universität Berlin. I obtained the title with distinction in 2010 in the fields of speech processing and robust automatic speech recognition. In my thesis "Integration of Short-Time Fourier Domain Speech Enhancement and Observation Uncertainty Techniques for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition" I formalized the concept of Short-Time Fourier Uncertainty Propagation (STFT-UP) and its relation to speech enhancement techniques such as the Wiener or Ephraim-Malah filters. In 2010 I was awarded with a FCT Post-Doctoral scholarship to join INESC-ID/L2F where I researched both robust speech recognition and robust natural language processing speech applications mixing deep learning and latent variable models. From 2016 I am Senior Research Scientist at Unbabel, keeping also an affiliation to INESC-ID as associate researcher. I am also co-founder of the Special Interest group for Robust Speech Processing (RoSP-SIG) and organizer of the LxMLS summer schools 2015, 2016.

I am an ISCA/ACL member and review in signal processing and machine learning journals and congresses (IEEE-TASLP/SPL, CSL, Interspeech, NIPS and EMNLP among others). It is hard to find things that do not interest me, but artificial and crowd intelligence seem particularly motivating in this moment in history.

You can find my GitHub repo here

Publications

Book Chapters

2016

• J. M. Lemos, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Angela Costa, André Silva, Hugo Silva, João Graça, Bhiksha Raj, Crowdsourced Video Subtitling with Adaptation Based on User-Corrected Lattices, September 2016

International Journals

2017

• Andre Martins, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Fábio Natanael Kepler, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Chris Hokamp, Roman Grundkiewicz, Pushing the Limits of Translation Quality Estimation, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), January 2017

2015

• Rahim Saedi, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Dorothea Kolossa, Uncertain LDA: Including observation uncertainties in discriminative transforms, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE, August 2015

2013

• Dorothea Kolossa, Steffen Zeiler, Rahim Saedi, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Noise-adaptive LDA: A new approach for speech recognition under observation uncertainty, IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, IEEE, vol. 20, n. 11, pages 1018 - 1021, doi: 10.1109/LSP.2013.2278556, August 2013

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Reinhold Orglmeister, Computing MMSE Estimates and Residual Uncertainty directly in the Feature Domain of ASR using STFT Domain Speech Distortion Models, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING, IEEE, vol. 21, n. 5, pages 1023-1034, May 2013

• Robert M. Nickel, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Dorothea Kolossa, Rainer Martin, Corpus-Based Speech Enhancement With Uncertainty Modeling and Cepstral Smoothing, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING, IEEE, vol. 21, n. 5, pages 983-997, May 2013

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Dorothea Kolossa, Alberto Abad, Steffen Zeiler, Rahim Saeidi, Pejman Mowlaee, João Paulo da Silva Neto, Rainer Martin, Integration of beamforming and uncertainty-of-observation techniques for robust ASR in multi-source environments, Computer Speech and Language, vol. 27, n. 3, pages 837-850, May 2013

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, An Extension of STFT Uncertainty Propagation for GMM-Based Super-Gaussian a Priori Models, IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, IEEE, vol. 20, n. 12, pages 1163-1166, December 2013

International Conferences

2018

• Lucia Specia, Frederic Blain, Varvara Logacheva, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Andre Martins, Findings of the wmt 2018 shared task on quality estimation, In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers, October 2018

2017

• Fábio Natanael Kepler, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Alberto Abad, Fusion of Simple Models for Native Language Identification, In 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 423-429, doi: 10.18653/v1/W17-5048, September 2017

• Rubén Solera Ureña, Helena Moniz, Fernando Batista, Vera Cabarrão, Anna Maria Pompili, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Joana Campos, Ana Paiva, Isabel Trancoso, A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach for Acoustic-Prosodic Personality Perception in Under-Resourced Domains, In Interspeech 2017, pages 929--933, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1732, Stockholm, Sweeden, August 2017

• Miguel Varela Ramos, Alan Black, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Isabel Trancoso, Nuno Fonseca, Segment Level Voice Conversion with Recurrent Neural Networks, In INTERSPEECH 2017, ISCA, August 2017

• Christian Huemmer, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Walter Kellerman, An improved uncertainty decoding scheme with weighted samples for multi-channel DNN-HMM hybrid systems, In Hands-free Speech Communications and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA), March 2017

2016

• Rubén Solera Ureña, Helena Moniz, Fernando Batista, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Joana Campos, Ana Paiva, Isabel Trancoso, Acoustic-prosodic automatic personality trait assessment for adults and children, In IberSPEECH 2016, Springer International Publishing, vol. 10077, series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 192--201, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-49169-1_19, , Lisbon, November 2016

• Alberto Abad, Eugénio Ribeiro, Fábio Natanael Kepler, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Isabel Trancoso, Exploiting Phone Log-Likelihood Ratio Features for the Detection of the Native Language of Non-Native English Speakers, In Interspeech 2016, San Francisco, US, September 2016

• André T. Martins, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Chris Hokamp, Fábio Natanael Kepler, Unbabel’s Participation in the WMT16 Word-Level Translation Quality Estimation Shared Task, August 2016

• André T. Martins, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, From Softmax to Sparsemax: A Sparse Model of Attention and Multi-Label Classification, July 2016

• Sílvio Moreira, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Wang Ling, Mário J. Silva, Isabel Trancoso, INESC-ID at SemEval-2016 Task 4-A: Reducing the Problem of Out-of-Embedding Words, In International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016), pages 238--242, July 2016

2015

• Wang Ling, Tiago Luís, Luís Marujo, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Sílvio Moreira, Chris Dyer, Alan Black, Isabel Trancoso, Finding Function in Form: Compositional Character Models for Open Vocabulary Word Representation, In 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2015), ACL, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2015

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Maria Joana Ribeiro Folgado Correia, Isabel Trancoso, Integration of DNN Based Speech Enhancement and ASR, In Interspeech 2015, ISCA, Dresden, Germany, September 2015

• Wang Ling, Lin Chu-Cheng, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sílvio Moreira, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Chris Dyer, Alan Black, Isabel Trancoso, Not All Contexts Are Created Equal: Better Word Representations with Variable Attention, In 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2015), ACL, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2015

• Christian Huemmer, Roland Maas, Andreas Schwarz, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Walter Kellermann, Uncertainty Decoding for DNN-HMM Hybrid Systems Based on Numerical Sampling, In Proceedings Interspeech 2015, ISCA, September 2015

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Sílvio Moreira, Wang Ling, Mário J. Silva, Isabel Trancoso, Learning Word Representations From Scarce and Noisy Data With Embedding Subspaces, In ACL-IJCNLP, Code: https://github.com/ramon-astudillo/NLSE, http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P15-1104, July 2015

• Sílvio Moreira, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Wang Ling, Bruno Martins, Mário J. Silva, Isabel Trancoso, INESC-ID: A Regression Model for Twitter Sentiment Lexicon Induction, In International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval), June 2015

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Sílvio Moreira, Wang Ling, Bruno Martins, Mário J. Silva, Isabel Trancoso, INESC-ID: Sentiment Analysis without hand-coded Features or Linguistic Resources using Embedding Subspaces, In International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval), Code: https://github.com/ramon-astudillo/NLSE, June 2015

2014

• Alberto Abad, José Matos, Hugo Meinedo, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Isabel Trancoso, The L2F system for the EVALITA-2014 speech activity detection challenge in domestic environments, In International Workshop EVALITA 2014, Pisa, Italy, December 2014

• José Matos, Alberto Abad, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Isabel Trancoso, Recognition of distant voice commands for home applications in Portuguese, In Iberspeech 2014, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, November 2014

• Marco Matassoni, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Athanasios Katsamanis, Mirco Ravanelli, The DIRHA-GRID corpus: baseline and tools for multi-room distant speech recognition using distributed microphones, In Interspeech 2014, pages 1613-1617, September 2014

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Sebastian Braun, Emanuël A., P. Habets, A Multichannel Feature Compensation Approach for Robust ASR in Noisy and Reverberant Environments, In REverberant Voice Enhancement and Recognition Benchmark (REVERB) workshop, May 2014

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso, Accounting for the Residual Uncertainty of Multi-Layer Perceptron Based Features, In International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pages 6859 - 6863, May 2014

2013

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, A propagation approach to modelling the joint distributions of clean and corrupted speech in the Mel-cepstral domain, In IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), pages 180-185, December 2013

• Alberto Abad, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Isabel Trancoso, The L2F Spoken Web Search system for Mediaeval 2013, In Mediaeval Workshop, Barcelona, Spain, October 2013

• Francesco Nesta, Marco Matassoni, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, A FLEXIBLE SPATIAL BLIND SOURCE EXTRACTION FRAMEWORK FOR ROBUST SPEECH RECOGNITION IN NOISY ENVIRONMENTS, In 2nd International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME), pages 33-38, June 2013

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Timo Gerkmann, On the Relation Between Speech Corruption Models in the Spectral and the Cepstral Domain, In 38th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), IEEE, pages 7044-7048, May 2013

2012

• Alberto Abad, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, The L2F Spoken Web Search system for Mediaeval 2012, In Mediaeval 2012 Workshop, Pisa, Italy, October 2012

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Alberto Abad, João Paulo da Silva Neto, Uncertainty driven Compensation of Multi-Stream MLP Acoustic Models for Robust ASR, In Interspeech 2012, ISCA, Portland, Oregon, US, September 2012

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Alberto Abad, João Paulo da Silva Neto, Integration of Beamforming and Automatic Speech Recognition Through Propagation of the Wiener Posterior, In ICASSP, pages 4909--4912, May 2012

• R. M. Nickel, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, D. Kolossa, S. Zeiler, R. Martin, Inventory-Style Speech Enhancement with Uncertainty-of-Observation Techniques, In ICASSP, pages 4645--4648, May 2012

• Thomas Pellegrini, Helena Moniz, Fernando Batista, Isabel Trancoso, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Extension of the LECTRA corpus: classroom LECture TRAnscriptions in European Portuguese, In SPEECH AND CORPORA, Belo Horizonte, March 2012

2011

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, João Paulo da Silva Neto, Propagation of Uncertainty through Multilayer Perceptrons for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition, In Interspeech, pages 461-464, October 2011

• Dorothea Kolossa, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Alberto Abad, Steffen Zeiler, Rahim Saeidi, Pejman Mowlaee, João Paulo da Silva Neto, Rainer Martin, CHIME Challenge: Approaches to Robustness using Beamforming and Uncertainty-of-Observation Techniques, In CHIME Workshop: International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments, September 2011

National Journals

2019

• Rubén Solera Ureña, Helena Moniz, Fernando Batista, Vera Cabarrão, Anna Maria Pompili, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Isabel Trancoso, Uma abordagem de aprendizagem semissupervisionada para a classificação automática de personalidade baseada em pistas acústico-prosódicas, Revista da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, vol. 5, pages 348-364, September 2019

National Conferences

2018

• Rubén Solera Ureña, Helena Moniz, Fernando Batista, Vera Cabarrão, Anna Maria Pompili, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Isabel Trancoso, Uma abordagem de aprendizagem semi-supervisionada para a percepção automática de personalidade, baseada em pistas acústico-prosódicas em domínios com poucos recursos, In XXXIV Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2018

Other Publications

2012

• Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Emmanuel Vincent, Li Deng, Uncertainty Handling for Environment-Robust Speech Recognition, Tutorial at Interspeech 2012 , September 2012

Special Session at Interspeech 2015

Robust Speech Processing using Observation Uncertainty and Uncertainty Propagation

Old Publications

A complete list of my publications can be found here, in particular, my doctoral thesis can be found here

Around the Web

My LinkedIn profile can be found here (I only add people I meet in person).