Seokhwan Kim
Principal Scientist, Amazon Alexa AI
Contact
1120 Enterprise Way, Sunnyvale, CA 94089, USA
+1 (650) 426-9701
Research Interests
Natural Language Processing
Spoken Dialogue Systems
Natural Language Understanding
Text Mining
Work Experiences
Principal Applied Scientist
Oct 2021 -
Alexa AI
Senior Applied Scientist
Jun 2019 - Oct 2021
Alexa AI
NLP Research Scientist
Jul 2017 - May 2019
Creative Intelligence Lab.
Research Scientist
Jan 2012 - Jul 2017
Dialogue Technology Lab.,
Human Language Technology Department
Human Language Technology Department
Research Intern
Apr 2011 - Aug 2011
Databases and Information Systems
Advisor: Prof. Gerhard Weikum
Advisor: Prof. Gerhard Weikum
Education
Ph.D.
Sep 2005 - Feb 2012
Computer Science and Engineering
Dissertation: Cross-Lingual Weakly-Supervised Learning of Semantic Relations
Advisor: Gary Geunbae Lee
Advisor: Gary Geunbae Lee
B.S.
Mar 2001 - Aug 2005
Computer Science and Engineering
Professional Experiences
Virtual Infrastructure Co-Chair
2022
Challenge & Demonstration Co-Chair
2022
Panelist
2022
Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC)
2021-2023
Board Member
2021-2023
Publicity Chair
2020
Challenge Chair
2019
Steering Committee
2018
Organizing Committee
2017
Organizing Committee
2016
Organizing Committee
2015
Local Organizing Committee Co-chair
2013
Publicity Committee Member
2012
Area Chair
Reviewer
AAAI, ACL, ACM-SIGIR, AI Magazine, CSL, CoNLL, EACL, EMNLP, ICLR, IEEE ASRU, IEEE ICASSP, IEEE SLT, IEEE/ACM TASLP, IJCAI, IJCNLP, IWSDS, Interspeech, NAACL-HLT, NeurIPS
Tutorials and Invited Talks
2020
Summary of the Eighth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC8).
Invited Talk @ The Third Workshop on Reasoning and Learning for Human-Machine Dialogues (DEEP-DIAL 2020), 08 Feb 2020.
Just ask: An Interactive Learning Framework for Vision and Language Navigation.
Invited Talk @ AI Assistant Summit (RE•WORK), 30 Jan 2020.
Publications
2023
[C67]
Identifying Entrainment in Task-oriented Conversations.
To appear in Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023), Rhodes Island, Jun 2023.
[C66]
PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis.
To appear in Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2023), Dubrovnik, May 2023. (Findings)
[C65]
Selective In-Context Data Augmentation for Intent Detection using Pointwise V-Information.
To appear in Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2023), Dubrovnik, May 2023.
2022
[C64]
Knowledge-Grounded Conversational Data Augmentation with Generative Conversational Networks.
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2022), Edinburgh, Sep 2022.
[J9]
Towards Textual Out-of-Domain Detection Without In-Domain Labels.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 30 (1386-1395), Mar 2022.
2021
[C61]
Towards Zero and Few-shot Knowledge-seeking Turn Detection in Task-orientated Dialogue Systems. (Best Paper)
Proceedings of the Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing NeurIPS Workshop (ENLSP 2021), Virtual, Dec 2021.
[C60]
"How robust r u?": Evaluating Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems on Spoken Conversations.
Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2021), Virtual, Dec 2021.
[C59]
Rome was built in 1776: A case study on factual correctness in knowledge-grounded response generation.
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI (NLP4ConvAI), Punta Cana, Nov 2021.
[J8]
Editorial: Special Issue on the Eighth Dialog System Technology Challenge.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 29 (2434-2436), Aug 2021.
[C57]
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2021), Singapore, Jul 2021.
[C56]
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2021), Singapore, Jul 2021.
[J7]
Overview of the Eighth Dialog System Technology Challenge: DSTC8.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 29 (2529-2540), May 2021.
[C55]
Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access Track in DSTC9.
Proceedings of the AAAI-21 Workshop on Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC9), Virtual, Feb 2021.
2020
[C54]
Policy-Driven Neural Response Generation for Knowledge-Grounded Dialog Systems.
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2020), Dublin, Dec 2020.
[C53]
Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access.
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2020), pp. 278-289, Boise, Jul 2020.
[C52]
Proceedings of the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 17th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-PRICAI 2020), pp. 1061-1068, Yokohama, Jul 2020.
(12.6% acceptance)
[C49]
Just ask: An Interactive Learning Framework for Vision and Language Navigation.
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20), New York, Feb 2020.
(20.6% acceptance)
2019
[C48]
The Eighth Dialog System Technology Challenge.
Proceedings of the 3rd Conversational AI workshop: Today's Practice and Tomorrow's Potential (ConvAI 2019), Vancouver, Dec 2019.
[C47]
Analyzing Sentence Fusion in Abstractive Summarization.
Proceedings of the EMNLP 2019 Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization (NewSum), Hong Kong, Nov 2019.
[C44]
Deep Recurrent Neural Networks with Layer-wise Multi-head Attentions for Punctuation Restoration.
Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2019), pp. 7280-7284, Brighton, May 2019.
[J6]
Overview of the Sixth Dialog System Technology Challenge: DSTC6.
Computer Speech and Language, 55 (1-25), May 2019.
2018
[C42]
Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2018), pp. 615-621, New Orleans, Jun 2018.
(29.4% acceptance)
2017
[C40]
Truly Multi-modal YouTube-8M Video Classification with Video, Audio, and Text (Team DL2.0, ranked at 22/650).
Proceedings of the CVPR 2017 Workshop on YouTube-8M Large-Scale Video Understanding (YouTube-8M), Honolulu, Jul 2017.
[J5]
Neural sentence embedding using only in-domain sentences for out-of-domain sentence detection in dialog systems.
Pattern Recognition Letters, 88 (26-32), Mar 2017.
2016
[C37]
Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS 2016), Saariselkä, Jan 2016.
2015
[C36]
A Robust Spoken Q&A System with Scarce In-Domain Resources.
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference 2015 (APSIPA ASC 2015), Hong Kong, Dec 2015.
[C35]
Configuration of Dialogue Agent with Multiple Knowledge Sources.
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference 2015 (APSIPA ASC 2015), Hong Kong, Dec 2015.
[C34]
Towards Improving the Performance of Vector Space Model for Chinese Frequently Asked Question.
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP 2015), Suzhou, Oct 2015.
[C33]
Conversational Agent and Management Tools for Conference and Tourism Domain.
Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2015), Dresden, Sep 2015. (Show and Tell)
[C32]
Towards Improving Dialogue Topic Tracking Performances with Wikification of Concept Mentions.
Proceedings of the 16th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2015), pp. 124-128, Prague, Sep 2015.
[C31]
Wikification of Concept Mentions within Spoken Dialogues Using Domain Constraints from Wikipedia.
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2015), pp. 2225-2229, Lisbon, Sep 2015.
(24.0% acceptance)
[C30]
CLARA: a multifunctional virtual agent for conference support and touristic information.
Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System (IWSDS 2015), Busan, Jan 2015. (Demo)
2014
[C29]
Design and Evaluation of a Conversational Agent for the Touristic Domain.
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference 2014 (APSIPA ASC 2014), Siem Reap, Dec 2014.
[C28]
An empirical evaluation of an IR-based strategy for chat-oriented dialogue systems.
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference 2014 (APSIPA ASC 2014), Siem Reap, Dec 2014.
[C27]
R-cube: a dialogue agent for Restaurant Recommendation and Reservation.
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference 2014 (APSIPA ASC 2014), Siem Reap, Dec 2014.
[C25]
SARA - Singapore's Automated Responsive Assistant for the Touristic Domain.
Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2014), pp. 2138-2139, Singapore, Sep 2014. (Show and Tell)
[C24]
Spoken Dialogue System for Restaurant Recommendation and Reservation.
Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2014), pp. 1488-1489, Singapore, Sep 2014. (Show and Tell)
[C23]
SARA - Singapore's Automated Responsive Assistant - A Multimodal Dialogue System for Touristic Information.
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Mobile Web Information Systems (MobiWIS 2014), pp. 153-164, Barcelona, Aug 2014.
[C22]
Proceedings of the 15th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2014), pp. 332-336, Philadelphia, Jun 2014.
[C20]
Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2014), pp. 131-135, Florence, May 2014.
[C19]
AIDA: An Avatar-Supported Multimodal Dialogue System.
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA 2014), Houston, May 2014.
[J4]
Cross-Lingual Annotation Projection for Weakly-Supervised Relation Extraction.
ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing, 13:1 (3), Feb 2014.
[C18]
Web-based Multimodal Multi-domain Spoken Dialogue System.
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2014), Napa, Jan 2014.
2013
[C17]
Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2013), pp. 145-147, Metz, Aug 2013. (Demo)
[C16]
A Graph-based Cross-lingual Projection Approach for Spoken Language Understanding Portability to a New Language.
Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2013), pp. 8332-8336, Vancouver, May 2013.
2012
[C15]
A Two-Step Approach for Efficient Domain Selection in Multi-Domain Dialog Systems.
Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System (IWSDS 2012), pp. 105-111, Ermenonville, Nov 2012.
[C12]
Seamless error correction interface for voice word processor.
Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2012), pp. 4973-4976, Kyoto, Mar 2012.
2011
[C11]
Multi-domain spoken dialog system for information access in mobile environment.
Proceedings of the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (IEEE ASRU 2011), Hawaii, Dec 2011. (Demo)
[C10]
A Cross-lingual Annotation Projection-based Self-supervision Approach for Open Information Extraction.
Proceedings of the 5th international joint conference on natural language processing (IJCNLP 2011), pp. 741-748, Chiang Mai, Nov 2011.
(27.0% acceptance)
[C9]
Web-search enhanced contents retrieval for information access dialog system.
Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011), pp. 1297-1300, Florence, Aug 2011.
[J3]
A Local Tree Alignment Approach to Relation Extraction of Multiple Arguments.
Information Processing and Management, 47:4 (593-605), Jul 2011.
2010
[C8]
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2010), pp. 564-571, Beijing, Aug 2010.
(19.0% acceptance)
2009
[C7]
A Local Tree Alignment-based Soft Pattern Matching Approach for Information Extraction.
Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics/Human Language Technology (NAACL HLT 2009), pp. 169-172, Colorado, May 2009.
[J2]
Example-based dialog modeling for practical multi-domain dialog system.
Speech Communications, 51:5 (466-484), May 2009.
2008
[J1]
DialogStudio: A workbench for data-driven spoken dialog system development and management.
Speech Communications, 50:8-9 (683-697), , Aug-Sep 2008.
[C5]
An alignment-based approach to semi-supervised relation extraction including multiple arguments.
Proceedings of the fourth Asian Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS 2008), Harbin, Jan 2008.
2007
[C4]
Example-based spoken dialog processing for guidance robots.
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on ubiquitous robots and ambient intelligence (URAI 2007), Pohang, Nov 2007.
[C3]
Proceedings of The 16th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (IEEE RO-MAN 2007), pp. 178-181, Jeju, Aug 2007.
[C2]
A semi-supervised method for efficient construction of statistical spoken language understanding resources.
Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2007), pp. 2797-2800, Antwerp, Aug 2007.
2006
[C1]
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology/North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL 2006), pp. 69-72, New York, Jun 2006.
Patents
[P18]
Answering questions during video playback.
Registration #US11544590B2, USA, 03 Jan 2023.
[P17]
Generating a response to a user query utilizing visual features of a video segment and a query-response-neural network.
Registration #US11244167B2, USA, 08 Feb 2022.
[P16]
Automatic text segmentation based on relevant context.
Registration #US11210470B2, USA, 28 Dec 2021.
[P15]
Generating ground truth annotations corresponding to digital image editing dialogues for training state tracking models.
Registration #US11100917B2, USA, 24 Aug 2021.
[P14]
Utilizing a dynamic memory network to track digital dialog states and generate responses.
Registration #US10909970B2, USA, 02 Feb 2021.
[P13]
Emphasizing key points in a speech file and structuring an associated transcription.
Registration #US10783314B2, USA, 22 Sep 2020.
[P12]
Entity Name Tagging Method Capable of Applying an Unsupervised Learning Method Including a Restriction Condition and a Device Thereof.
Registration #10-1255957, South Korea, 11 Apr 2013.
[P11]
Conversation Classification Method Capable of Classifying Conversation Intention by Using a Hidden Markov Model.
Registration #10-1255468, South Korea, 10 Apr 2013.
[P10]
Information Search Method by Using the Web Capable of Using a Vector Space Database and a Voice Converstaion Method Using the Method.
Registration #10-1252397, South Korea, 02 Apr 2013.
[P9]
Speech Processing Device Capable of Effective Input Modification and a Method Thereof.
Registration #10-1197010, South Korea, 26 Oct 2012.
[P8]
Korean Open Type Information Extracting Method and Program Readable Recording Medium Capable of Increasing Korean Open Type Information Extracting Performances.
Registration #10-1180589, South Korea, 31 Aug 2012.
[P7]
Method for searching for information using the web and method for voice conversation using same.
Registration #PCT/KR2012/004405, 28 Aug 2012.
[P6]
User profile automatic creation apparatus through voice dialog meaning process, and contents recommendation apparatus using the same.
Registration #10-1072176, South Korea, 04 Oct 2011.
[P5]
Method and apparatus for searching voice data from audio and video data under the circumstances including unregistered words.
Registration #10-1069534, South Korea, 26 Sep 2011.
[P4]
Method of automatically detecting dangerous situation using natural language extraction and apparatus thereof.
Registration #10-1023031, South Korea, 10 Mar 2011.
[P3]
Method and apparatus for automatically constructing ontology from non-structure web documents.
Registration #10-0917176, South Korea, 07 Sep 2009.
[P2]
Method and system for recognizing biological named entity based on workbench.
Registration #10-0825687, South Korea, 22 Apr 2008.
[P1]
Dialog management apparatus and method for chatting agent.
Registration #10-0818979, South Korea, 27 Mar 2008.