About
Introduction
I am an Associate Professor of Speech Processing and the head of Laboratory of Language Technology at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech). I received my PhD degree from the same university in 2006. After that, I have worked in several research teams, including LIMSI/CNRS, Aalto University and Raytheon BBN Technologies. My recent research has focused on practical approaches to low-resource speech and language processing. I have published papers in a wide array of topics, including speech recognition, speaker and language recognition, speaker diarization, spoken language translation and summarization. I have led several teams that have obtained excellent results in various speech processing evaluations and challenges, such as IARPA BABEL, NIST LRE and OpenASR.
Awards and achievements
- Best student paper award at Odyssey 2024: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop for the paper: Joonas Kalda, Clément Pagés, Ricard Marxer, Tanel Alumäe, Hervé Bredin. PixIT: Joint Training of Speaker Diarization and Speech Separation from Real-world Multi-speaker Recordings.
- Best student paper award at TSD 2018 for the paper: Asadullah, Tanel Alumäe. Data Augmentation and Teacher-Student Training for LF-MMI Based Robust Speech Recognition.
- Excellent result in NIST Language Recognition Evaluation 2022, described in the paper: Tanel Alumäe, Kunnar Kukk, Viet-Bac Le, Claude Barras, Abdel Messaoudi, Waad Ben. Exploring the Impact of Pretrained Models and Web-Scraped Data for the 2022 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation.
- Top results in NIST OpenASR20 Challenge, described in the paper: Tanel Alumäe, Jiaming Kong. Combining Hybrid and End-to-End Approaches for the OpenASR20 Challenge.
- Excellent results in IARPA BABEL Program and NIST Open Keyword Search (OpenKWS) Evaluation, described in the paper: Tanel Alumäe, Damianos Karakos, William Hartmann, Roger Hsiao, Le Zhang, Long Nguyen, Stavros Tsakalidis, Richard Schwartz. The 2016 BBN Georgian Telephone Speech Keyword Spotting System.
- Top results in ASRU 2023 MADASR Challenge, Interspeech 2024 DISPLACE Challenge
Publications
R&D related managerial and administrative work
- Secretary of the Board of the Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT)
- Reviewer for the journals Nature, Computer Speech & Language, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Speech Communication, Journal of the Acoustic Society of America (JASA), Entropy
- Area Chair of the conferences ICME 2020, ICME 2021, EACL 2021, Interspeech 2024
- Publication Chair of the NoDaLiDa 2023 conference
- Member of the Council of the Department of Software Science at TalTech