Bayesian Approaches to Uncertainty in Speech Processing

This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that no quotation from the thesis, nor any information derived therefrom, may be published without the author’s prior written consent. Many techniques in speech processing require inference based on observations that are of-ten noisy, incomplete or scarce. In such situations, it is necessary to draw on statistical techniques that themselves must be robust to the nature of the observations. The Bayesian method is a school of thought within statistics that provides such a robust framework for handling “difficult ” data. In particular, it provides means to handle situations where data are scarce or even missing. Three broad situations are outlined in which the Bayesian technique is helpful to solve the associated problems. The analysis covers eight publications that appeared between 1996 and 2011. Dialogue act recognition is the inference of dialogue acts or moves from words spoken in a conversation. A technique is presented based on counting words. It is formulate