On August 26, Yang Liu, Amazon principal applied scientist, joined Jeff Blankenburg, principal Alexa evangelist, on Alexa & Friends to discuss her work in speech recognition and understanding, prosody modeling, summarization, and natural language processing. Liu also discussed her career, recent awards, how commonsense inference for smooth and effective communication is impacting human-like language responses, the growing popularity of virtual assistants, and the challenges that presents for entity resolution.
Liu received the 2021 ISCA Fellow award and the 2021 IEEE Fellow award for her achievements in speech understanding and language-learning technology. She joined the Alexa AI team in September 2019 and has been working on task-oriented dialog and open domain conversations.
Liu received her PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University and has held research roles at ICSI in Berkeley, Google, Facebook, and was head of LAIX AI lab, as well as a computer science professor at University of Texas at Dallas.
Liu has been working in the area of speech and language for 25 years and her breadth of work and ISCA Fellow award will be recognized at the Interspeech 2021 conference this year.
