Dr Julian Hough

Julian HoughPhD

Lecturer

Swansea University

Google Scholar

Research

natural language processing, human-robot interaction, dialogue systems, computational linguistics

Interests

I'm a researcher who builds computational models of human communication with natural language and physical action from human-human data, and then implements them in artificial systems to make interaction more natural. Anyone afraid that AI is a done deal and that the machines are coming for us is welcome to interact with state-of-the-art systems which interpret and generate speech and gesture- you will probably walk away rather relieved, and with more understanding as to why people like me have a job!

Publications

Publications of specific relevance to Advanced Robotics

2022

Ozkan EE, Gurion T, Hough J, Healey PGT and Jamone L (2022). Speaker Motion Patterns during Self-repairs in Natural Dialogue. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMODAL INTERACTION  10.1145/3536220.3563684
Poesio M, Bartle R, Chamberlain J, Hough J, Madge C, Perez-Liebana D, Purver M and Yu J (2022). ARCIDUCA: Annotating Reference and Coreference In Dialogue Using Conversational Agents in games.
Gregoromichelaki E, Eshghi A, Howes C, Mills G, Kempson R, Hough J, Healey P and Purver M (2022). Language and Cognition as Distributed Process and Interactions. Conference: Proceedings of the 26th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue 
Nagele AN, Hough J and Dinnen Z (2022). The Subjectivities of Wearable Sleep-Trackers - A Discourse Analysis. Conference: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts), April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA (New Orleans)  10.1145/3491101.3519677

2021

Del Bosque Trevino JE, Hough J and Purver M (2021). Communicative Grounding of Analogical Explanations in Dialogue: A Corpus Study of Conversational Management Acts and Statistical Sequence Models for Tutoring through Analogy., Editors: Howes C, Simon D, Breitholtz E and Chatzikyriakidis S. https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2021.reinact-1/  23-31. Conference: Reasoning and Interaction (Gothenburg, Sweden) 
Nasreen S, HOUGH J and Purver M (2021). Detecting Alzheimer's Disease using Interactional and Acoustic features from Spontaneous Speech. Conference: Interspeech  10.21437/Interspeech.2021-1526
Özkan EE, Gurion T, Hough J, Healey PGT and Jamone L (2021). Specific hand motion patterns correlate to miscommunications during dyadic conversations. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Conference: 2021 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL)  10.1109/icdl49984.2021.9515613
Nasreen S, HOUGH J and Purver M (2021). Rare-Class Dialogue Act Tagging for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis. Conference: SIGDIAL: 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue 
Purver M, Sadrzadeh M, Kempson R, Wijnholds G and Hough J (2021). Incremental Composition in Distributional Semantics. Journal of Logic, Language and Information  10.1007/s10849-021-09337-8
Nasreen S, Rohanian M, Hough J and Purver M (2021). Alzheimer’s Dementia Recognition From Spontaneous Speech Using Disfluency and Interactional Features. Frontiers in Computer Science  vol. 3, 640669-640669. 10.3389/fcomp.2021.640669
Rohanian M, Hough J and Purver M (2021). Alzheimer's dementia recognition using acoustic, lexical, disfluency and speech pause features robust to noisy inputs. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH  vol. 6, 4191-4195. 10.21437/Interspeech.2021-1633
Rohanian M, Hough J and Purver M (2021). Multi-modal fusion with gating using audio, lexical and disfluency features for Alzheimer's Dementia recognition from spontaneous speech. CoRR  vol. abs/2106.09668,
Rohanian M and Hough J (2021). Best of both worlds: Making high accuracy non-incremental transformer-based disfluency detection incremental. ACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conferen  3693-3703. 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.286

2020

Rohanian M and Hough J (2020). Re-framing Incremental Deep Language Models for Dialogue Processing with Multi-task Learning. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics  497-507. Conference: The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics  10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.43
Rohanian M, Hough J and Purver M (2020). Multi-modal fusion with gating using audio, lexical and disfluency features for Alzheimer's Dementia recognition from spontaneous speech. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH  vol. 2020-October, 2187-2191. Conference: Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH  10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2721

2019

Rohanian M, Hough J and Purver M (2019). Detecting depression with word-level multimodal fusion. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH  vol. 2019-September, 1443-1447. Conference: 20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association - INTERSPEECH (Graz, Austria)  10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2283
Ginzburg J, Breitholtz E, Cooper R, Hough J and Tian Y (2019). Understanding laughter. Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium, AC 2015  137-146.

2018

Kempson R, Gregoromichelaki E, Eshghi A and Hough J (2018). Ellipsis in Dynamic Syntax. The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis  10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198712398.013.9
Sadrzadeh M, Purver M, Hough J and Kempson R (2018). Exploring Semantic Incrementality with Dynamic Syntax and Vector Space Semantics.
HOUGH J, JAMONE L, Schlangen D, Walck G and Haschke R (2018). Towards a Types-As-Classifiers Approach to Dialogue Processing in Human-Robot Interaction., Editors: HOWES C, Dobnik S and Breitholtz E. Conference: Workshop on Dialogue and Perception (DaP 2018) 
PURVER MRJ, HOUGH J and HOWES C (2018). Computational Models of Miscommunication Phenomena. Topics in Cognitive Science  10.1111/tops.12324

2017

Maier A, HOUGH J and Schlangen D (2017). Towards Deep End-of-Turn Prediction for Situated Spoken Dialogue Systems. Conference: InterSpeech 2017  10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1593
Hough J and Schlangen D (2017). It's Not What You Do, It's How You Do It: Grounding Uncertainty for a Simple Robot. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction  vol. Part F127194, 274-282. 10.1145/2909824.3020214
HOUGH J and PURVER MRJ (2017). Probabilistic Record Type Lattices for Incremental Reference Processing. Modern Perspectives in Type-Theoretical Semantics , Editors: Chatzikyriakidis S and Luo Z. Springer International Publishing 10.1007/978-3-319-50422-3_8
Hough J and Schlangen D (2017). Joint, incremental disfluency detection & utterance segmentation from speech. 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2017 - Proceedings of Conference  vol. 1, 326-336. 10.18653/v1/e17-1031
de Kok I, Hülsmann F, Waltemate T, Frank C, Hough J, Pfeiffer T, Schlangen D, Schack T, Botsch M and Kopp S (2017). The intelligent coaching space: A demonstration. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformat  vol. 10498 LNAI, 105-108. 10.1007/978-3-319-67401-8_12
Baumann T, Kennington C, Hough J and Schlangen D (2017). Recognising conversational speech: What an incremental ASR should do for a dialogue system and how to get there. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering  vol. 999 LNEE, 421-432. 10.1007/978-981-10-2585-3_35
Howes C, Lavelle M, Healey PGT, Hough J and McCabe R (2017). Disfluencies in dialogues with patients with schizophrenia. CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition  2230-2235.

2016

De Kok I, Hough J, Schlangen D and Kopp S (2016). Deictic gestures in coaching interactions. MA3HMI 2016 - Proceedings of the Workshop on Multimodal Analyses Enabling Artificial Agents in Human-Machine Interaction  10-14. 10.1145/3011263.3011267
HEALEY PGT, HOWES C, HOUGH J and PURVER MRJ (2016). Better late than Now-or-Never: The case of interactive repair phenomena. Behavioral and Brain Sciences  vol. 39, e76-e76. 10.1017/S0140525X15000813
Zarrieß S, Hough J, Kennington C, Manuvinakurike R, DeVault D, Fernández R and Schlangen D (2016). PentoRef: A corpus of spoken references in task-oriented dialogues. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016  125-131.
Hough J, Tian Y, De Ruiter L, Betz S, Kousidis S, Schlangen D and Ginzburg J (2016). DUEL: A multi-lingual multimodal dialogue corpus for disfluency, exclamations and laughter. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016  1784-1788.
Hough J and Schlangen D (2016). Investigating Fluidity for Human-Robot Interaction with Real-time, Real-world Grounding Strategies. SIGDIAL 2016 - 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Proceedings of the Conference  288-298.

2015

De Kok I, Hough J, Hülsmann F, Botsch M, Schlangen D and Kopp S (2015). A multimodal system for real-time action instruction in motor skill learning. ICMI 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction  355-362. 10.1145/2818346.2820746
Eshghi A, Howes C, Gregoromichelaki E, Hough J and Purver M (2015). Feedback in Conversation as Incremental Semantic Update. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Semantics  261-271. Conference: International Conference on Computational Semantics 
Hough J, Kennington C, Schlangen D and Ginzburg J (2015). Incremental semantics for dialogue processing: Requirements, and a comparison of two approaches. IWCS 2015 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Semantics  206-216.
Hough J and Schlangen D (2015). Recurrent neural networks for incremental disfluency detection. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH  vol. 2015-January, 849-853.

2014

Hough J and Purver M (2014). Strongly Incremental Repair Detection. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)  78-89. 10.3115/v1/d14-1009
Purver M, Hough J and Gregoromichelaki E (2014). Dialogue and Compound Contributions. Natural Language Generation in Interactive Systems , Editors: Stent A and Bangalore S. Cambridge University Press 10.1017/CBO9780511844492.004
Hough J and Purver M (2014). Probabilistic Type Theory for Incremental Dialogue Processing. Proceedings of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Type Theory and Natural Language Semantics (TTNLS)  80-88. 10.3115/v1/w14-1410
Hough J and Purver M (2014). Strongly Incremental Repair Detection., Editors: Moschitti A, Pang B and Daelemans W. EMNLP  78-89.

2013

Howes C, Healey PG, Eshghi A and Hough J (2013). "Well, that's one way": Interactivity in parsing and production. Behav Brain Sci  vol. 36, (4) 359-359. 10.1017/S0140525X12002592
Eshghi A, Hough J and Purver M (2013). Incremental Grammar Induction from Child-Directed Dialogue Utterances. Proceedings of the 4th Annual Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL)  94-103. Conference: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) (Sofia, Bulgaria) 
PURVER MRJ, Eshghi A and Hough J (2013). Data-driven Learning in an Incremental Grammar Framework. Humboldt University Conference: Linguistic Evidence (Tübingen) 
Eshghi A, Purver M and Hough J (2013). Probabilistic Induction for an Incremental Semantic Grammar. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2013) – Long Papers  107-118.
Eshghi A, Purver M, Hough J and Sato Y (2013). Probabilistic Grammar Induction in an Incremental Semantic Framework. Constraint Solving and Language Processing - 7th International Workshop, Cslp 2012, OrléAns, France, September 2012. Revised Sel , Editors: Duchier D and Parmentier Y. Springer 10.1007/978-3-642-41578-4_6

2012

Eshghi A, Purver M, Hough J and Sato Y (2012). Inducing lexical entries for an incremental semantic grammar., Editors: Duchier D and Parmentier Y. Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Language Processing (CSLP’12)  39-50. Conference: 7th International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Language Processing (CSLP’12) (University of Orleans. France) 

2011

Purver M, Eshghi A and Hough J (2011). Incremental Semantic Construction in a Dialogue System., Editors: Bos J and Pulman S. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS)  365-369. Conference: 9th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) 

Grants

Grants of specific relevance to Advanced Robotics
Annotating Reference and Coreference In Dialogue Using Conversational Agents in games
Poesio M, Bartle RA, Chamberlain J, Hough J, Perez Llebana D and Purver M
£1,091,328 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (01-02-2022 - 31-01-2025)
Summary