About

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I’m a research scientist with a focus on machine learning for speech technologies. I received my PhD from the Electrical Engineering Department at Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Dr. Naomi Harte. I have published first-author papers at a number of top-tier conferences such as ACL, Interspeech, ICMI, and Eusipco. I have also acted as a reviewer for conferences such as ICASSP, Interspeech, and ICMI. My PhD topic was on the design of conversational turn-taking models for spoken dialogue systems (SDSs). More specifically, my PhD focused on extracting information from multiple modalities to train deep learning models that predict conversational turn-taking behaviors. The research incorporates elements from pure machine-learning, natural language processing, audio-visual signal processing, and social sciences. During my PhD I was part of the Sigmedia Lab and my work was funded by the ADAPT Centre.

PhD Thesis

• “Neural Turn-Taking Models for Spoken Dialogue Systems.” Trinity College Dublin, 2021. [ pdf ]

Publications

• Roddy, Matthew, and Naomi Harte. “Neural Generation of Dialogue Response Timings.” Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2020. [ pdf ] [ code ]
• Roddy, Matthew, and Naomi Harte. “Predictive Turn-Taking Decisions With POMDPs.” SigDial (Late-Breaking Results), 2019. [ pdf ]
• Roddy, Matthew, Gabriel Skantze, and Naomi Harte. “Multimodal Continuous Turn-Taking Prediction Using Multiscale RNNs.” ICMI, 2018. [ pdf ] [ code ]
• Roddy, Matthew, Gabriel Skantze, and Naomi Harte. “Investigating Speech Features for Continuous Turn-Taking Prediction Using LSTMs.” INTERSPEECH, 2018. [ pdf ] [ code ]
• Roddy, Matthew, and Naomi Harte. “Detecting conversational gaze aversion using unsupervised learning.” European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), 2017. [ pdf ]
• Roddy, Matthew, and Naomi Harte. “Towards predicting dialog acts from previous speakers’ non-verbal cues.” Symposium on Multimodal Communication (MMSYM), 2017. [ pdf ]
• Roddy, Matthew, and Jacqueline Walker. “A Method of Morphing Spectral Envelopes of the Singing Voice for Use with Backing Vocals.” DAFx, 2014. [ pdf ]

Video