Nigel Ward received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of
California at Berkeley in 1991. He was a faculty member at the
University of Tokyo for ten years before joining UTEP in 2002. He
has served on NSF panels on Language Processing and on Learning Technologies,
and was an organizer of the Special Session on the Prosody of Turn-Taking and Dialog Acts at Interspeech 2006.
Ward's research areas lie in the intersection of spoken language and
human-computer interaction. One focus is improving the usability of
today's spoken dialog systems, another is the study of fundamental
issues in dialog modeling using a variety of methods: statistical,
linguistic, systems-building, and experimental. Current topics
include the subtle prosodic signals that enable inference of a dialog
partner's needs, intentions, and feelings at the sub-second level, and
the use of these for more accurate speech recognition, for swifter and
smoother turn-taking, and for more responsive, habitable dialog systems.
| Advisees |
Cyrus Brooks,
Joshua McCartney, Shreyas Karkhedkar, Alejandro Vega, Ben Walker.
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| Former Students and Former Affiliations |
