Komatani Laboratory at SANKEN, Osaka University, conducts research on spoken dialogue systems, speech signal processing, and natural language processing.

Spoken dialogue systems and speech recognition technologies are now widely used in society, including apps on smartphones such as Apple’s Siri and smart speakers such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

At Komatani Lab, we utilize speech recognition and natural language processing technologies to build new spoken dialogue systems and develop technologies for elements that solve problems in such systems. This research field has both engineering aspects of writing programs and creating systems and scientific aspects of considering what it means to be able to “communicate”. Since we deal with human language, we need to be exposed to the findings of linguistics and social psychology.

Although speech recognition performance has improved, it is still difficult to create a spoken dialogue system that can perform like human beings because of the lack of knowledge and ability to recognize surrounding situations, but it is a challenge worth tackling. If you are interested in “what it means to be able to communicate with human beings,” why don’t you join us in our research?